It’s hard not to root for a character this hilarious and cunning; let’s hope she has a few more misadventures in her future.
Asher’s two crime novellas feature con artist Olivia Jane Doe as she charms, cheats and hustles her way through Florida and Mexico.
The first novella is set in Fort Lauderdale and narrated by small-time grifter Parker, who has been running short cons at the local marina, where he works with his partner in crime, Dave. Parker meets Olivia when he falls victim to one of her hustles. She takes a liking to him and convinces him to ditch Dave and join her in a scheme to scam money from the owner of the marina. The story is a fun caper with snappy dialogue. There’s an early debate between Parker and Dave about the rules of rock-paper-scissors that’s especially funny. Olivia and Parker’s heist, however, stalls the plot rather than adding tension. There are so many crosses and double crosses that the storylines sag, and it’s difficult to care about who comes out on top. The second, stronger novella is narrated in the third person and reveals Olivia’s motivations. Set in Mexico, the tale opens as Olivia has just lost two of her partners in a con gone wrong. She’s buried nearly $1 million in the middle of the desert for safekeeping and needs to flee the country stat. Asher deftly handles the plot’s many twists, turns and flashbacks. As in the first novella, it’s the whip-smart dialogue that makes the story shine. It’s a joy to watch Olivia match wits with everyone from a Mexican crime lord to a flight instructor, whom she tries to talk into giving her a lift across the border. At one point she attempts to convince him to let her pilot the plane even though she’s never flown before. When the flight instructor tells her this plan is “suicide,” she responds, “No, it’s not…I’ve thought about suicide. This is my second, and slightly better option.”
It’s hard not to root for a character this hilarious and cunning; let’s hope she has a few more misadventures in her future.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Dog Ear
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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