The setup is irresistible, the twists generously piled on and the climax suitably pulse-pounding, even though best-selling...
Eighteen years after her fiance dumped her, a New York City police detective runs into him again online, with results that make her head spin and leave several people dead.
Given a one-year subscription to YouAreJustMyType.com, Kat Donovan browses languidly through the photos of eligible men looking for love until she sees the face of Jeff Raynes. Although she’s not exactly carrying a torch for her ex, she can’t resist dropping him a line. His reactions are puzzling. First he doesn’t seem to remember her, then he greets her with warm affection, then he says they’d better not continue to be in touch. Jeff’s not the only one acting oddly. Brandon Phelps, a college student from Connecticut, comes all the way to New York to ask for Kat’s help in finding his missing mother, Dana. Even though he’s asked for Kat by name—how does he even know her name?—it’s obvious that he’s hiding something from the detective whose help he begs. And there’s more. When Kat goes to visit Monte Leburne, the dying contract killer who was convicted years ago of shooting her father, another NYPD detective, and the prison nurse puts Leburne into twilight sedation, he denies killing Henry Donovan. No matter where she turns, Kat can’t figure out what’s going on or whom she can trust. Jeff, who’s vanished once more? The unreliable Brandon Phelps? Her partner, Charles "Chaz" Faircloth, who’s convinced he’s God’s gift to Kat? Her father’s ex-partner, Capt. Thomas Stagger, who’s clearly not telling everything he knows about Donovan’s death? Her judo instructor, Aqua, a schizophrenic, homeless sometime transvestite? Her defensive mother, Hazel, who seems determined to protect Donovan’s reputation? Her own cherished memories of her father?
The setup is irresistible, the twists generously piled on and the climax suitably pulse-pounding, even though best-selling Coben (Six Years, 2013, etc.) is hard-pressed to tie all those complications together or produce a payoff that rises to their deliciously suspenseful levels.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-525-953-49-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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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