Relentlessly paves the way for what promises to be an epic third book.
The second book in Guillermo del Toro (director of Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy, etc.) and Chuck Hogan's (Devils in Exile, 2010, etc.) The Strain trilogy finds civilization teetering on the brink.
The Strain (2009), the first book in the trilogy, was built on a compelling premise: What if vampires were not campy, caped bloodsuckers, or dark-but-hunky Twilight-esque heartthrobs, but rather the victims of a ravenous blood-borne parasite? And what if, as part of an elaborate plan, an ancient carrier of said parasites set out to sow its bloodsucking oats by starting an epidemic in New York City? A vampire threat like that calls for an epidemiologist, in this case Dr. Ephraim Goodweather of the CDC. The Strain closed with Ephraim and his companions—CDC colleague (and sometime love interest) Dr. Nora Martinez, exterminator Vasiliy Fet and Holocaust survivor and seasoned vampire hunter Abraham Setrakian—narrowly failing to destroy the Master, orchestrator of the outbreak, as his pandemic was starting to pick up steam. As this book opens, things have gone from worse to much, much worse. With more and more of its citizens turning into vampires, New York plunges into anarchy. Dr. Goodweather and his cohorts face increasingly long odds as they attempt to stem the tide, while protecting Dr. Goodweather's son Zach from his mother, a newly minted vampire bent on "turning" her beloved son. Meanwhile, the Master, working with sickly but fabulously wealthy Eldritch Palmer, continues to engineer the contagion's spread and the collapse of human society, much to the chagrin of a group of powerful vampires known as the Ancients, who prefer to wield their substantial power and influence from the shadows. The key to stopping the Master seems to lie in a very old, silver-bound book, but against the Master's minions and Palmer's wealth and influence, the book appears to be well out of our heroes’ reach. The series stands out from the recent spate of vampire-themed entertainment thanks to its semi-scientific premise, convincing characters and wealth of almost cinematically vivid scenes of terror. This book continues in the same chilling vein.
Relentlessly paves the way for what promises to be an epic third book.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-155822-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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