A truly absorbing mystery by a writer at the top of her game.
Royce’s murder mystery, involving generational vengeance in the time of Covid-19, would make the ancient Greeks proud.
In 1948, 12-year-old Noelle Huber was brutally murdered in Pittsburgh. The case was never solved; her older brother, Matthew, was a perennial suspect but was never charged. Shift now to Linda Alonso in Palm Beach, Florida. It’s 2020; she and her Argentina-born husband, Miguel, have two young kids and a shaky marriage. Enter “the writer,” whose identity we won’t learn until later. The chapters toggle between “The Wife” (Linda) and “A Writer’s Thoughts.” The writer, we learn—because as the narrator, she tells us so—is a moderately successful mystery writer also living in Palm Beach, a loner and a stalker and more than a little scary. And let us not forget Miguel’s older brother, Diego, who shows up on the Alonsos’ doorstep after many years when he was presumed dead. Royce is a wicked good writer (“Diego had carved out pieces of each of the children’s hearts and inserted himself inside”). Her portrait of Linda Alonso is good, but her portrait of the writer is even more impressively creepy. Shall we call her Nemesis? A very clever gimmick is that the writer is certainly meant to be a stand-in for Royce, the author behind it all. This is meta with a vengeance, a story about telling a story, and fascinating for students of that stuff. Another clever trick is that characters that we have a bias to trust, like Linda, may not be so trustworthy. If this is dirty pool, the reader will have to decide. And there are some serendipitous developments, as the writer is the first to admit. But overall, the gears of this clever plot mesh like those of a Swiss watch. There is some time shifting, but the chronology works out in the end.
A truly absorbing mystery by a writer at the top of her game.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1637584965
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A weird, wild ride.
Celebrity scandal and a haunted lake drive the narrative in this bestselling author’s latest serving of subtly ironic suspense.
Sager’s debut, Final Girls (2017), was fun and beautifully crafted. His most recent novels—Home Before Dark (2020) and Survive the Night (2021) —have been fun and a bit rickety. His new novel fits that mold. Narrator Casey Fletcher grew up watching her mother dazzle audiences, and then she became an actor herself. While she never achieves the “America’s sweetheart” status her mother enjoyed, Casey makes a career out of bit parts in movies and on TV and meatier parts onstage. Then the death of her husband sends her into an alcoholic spiral that ends with her getting fired from a Broadway play. When paparazzi document her substance abuse, her mother exiles her to the family retreat in Vermont. Casey has a dry, droll perspective that persists until circumstances overwhelm her, and if you’re getting a Carrie Fisher vibe from Casey Fletcher, that is almost certainly not an accident. Once in Vermont, she passes the time drinking bourbon and watching the former supermodel and the tech mogul who live across the lake through a pair of binoculars. Casey befriends Katherine Royce after rescuing her when she almost drowns and soon concludes that all is not well in Katherine and Tom’s marriage. Then Katherine disappears….It would be unfair to say too much about what happens next, but creepy coincidences start piling up, and eventually, Casey has to face the possibility that maybe some of the eerie legends about Lake Greene might have some truth to them. Sager certainly delivers a lot of twists, and he ventures into what is, for him, new territory. Are there some things that don’t quite add up at the end? Maybe, but asking that question does nothing but spoil a highly entertaining read.
A weird, wild ride.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18319-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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