Delightfully irreverent and so very entertaining.
From the co-creator of Deadpool: Two unlikely suburban misfits team up to solve two very real murders in “a small American town rife with racial and cultural prejudice.”
Kenneth Lee peaked early as a reporter when he broke a major sex scandal; unfortunately, those glory days are far behind him. Andrea Stern, once an up-and-coming FBI profiler responsible for catching a serial killer, is now hugely pregnant with her fifth child and spends her days toting her other four kids to and from the train station to drop off and pick up her commuter husband. When Andrea pulls into a gas station parking lot and happens upon a murder scene—the victim was Satkunananthan Sasmal, who'd been pumping gas—her sharp eyes and analytical brain instantly register some key details. A few days later, after a chance encounter with some Indian American women who lay out the realities of racism in the community—they can’t even get their requests to put pools in their backyards approved, much less count on the cops to solve a murder—Andrea is hit with an idea that takes her deep into the local records. She teams up with Kenny, whom she knew when they were teenagers, and soon they're uncovering bones from a decades-old murder that is directly related to the recent shooting. Along the way, Andrea discovers how much she loves using her brain for something other than planning her children’s schedules, and Kenny reestablishes his willingness to do whatever he can to break a major story. (As Andrea says, “He was a dick, but he was good at it.”) The obvious play on dicks really sums up the tone of the novel. Satire is hard to establish and even harder to maintain, but Nicieza flawlessly critiques the pervasiveness of suburban racism, the challenge of stay-at-home motherhood, the toxic culture of White masculinity, and the self-aggrandizing role of the media, and he does it with a pair of completely flawed yet appealing characters and a diverse cast of voices.
Delightfully irreverent and so very entertaining.Pub Date: June 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-19126-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
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
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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