Tense, taut, and terrifying—until the reveal. Read the first 43 chapters and be satisfied.
A contemporary mystery may hold the key to a 20-year-old murder and abduction case.
As a blizzard rages across the Iowa plains, true-crime writer Wylie Lark steps outside with her dog—and discovers a half-frozen child in her front yard. When revived, the boy shows clear signs of abuse and trauma, so Wylie braves the elements to see if perhaps he's been in a car accident. Sure enough, a truck crumpled in the ditch leads Wylie to another body, a clearly injured woman, also almost frozen to death. Who are these two strangers who are willing to risk their lives to run away from something—or someone—in the midst of such terrible weather? Intercut with this unspooling mystery is another that took place 20 years earlier in the same small town: A family was murdered, their daughter the only survivor, and the daughter’s friend went missing the same night and has never been found. Gudenkauf offers a third narrative strand, told from the perspective of a young girl who lives with her mother and fears the occasional visits of a brutal, abusive father figure. Of course, all of these narratives will share a solution in the end. Up to this point, the suspense that Gudenkauf creates and builds into each separate story is masterful, terrible, and absolutely addicting. The problem: the solution feels arbitrary and, ultimately, disappointing. There are no clues leading the earnest reader to the answer, just an author’s deus ex machina. Despite an actively plotted climax and a gesture toward a hopeful ending, the unknown is the lifeblood of this novel; once the truth comes out, the energy, originality, and interest wink out, too.
Tense, taut, and terrifying—until the reveal. Read the first 43 chapters and be satisfied.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-778-31193-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
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
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.
Following the mysterious disappearance of his wife, a struggling London novelist journeys to a remote Scottish island to try to get his mojo back—but all, of course, is not what it seems.
Grady Green hits the pinnacle of his publishing career on the same night that his life goes off the rails—first his book lands on the New York Times bestseller list, and then his wife, Abby, goes missing on her way home. A year later, Grady is a mere shadow of his former self: out of money and out of ideas. So, when his agent, Abby’s godmother, suggests that he spend some time on the Isle of Amberly, in a log cabin left to her by one of her writers, it seems as good a plan as any. With free housing for himself and his dog and a beautiful, distraction-free environment, maybe he can finally complete the next novel. But from the very beginning, Grady’s experiences with Amberly seem weird, if not downright ominous: As a visitor, he’s not allowed to bring his car onto the island; the local businesses are only open for a few hours at a time; and there are no birds. At all. Not to mention the skeletal hand he finds buried under the floorboards of the cabin, the creepy harmonica music in the woods, and the occasional sighting of a woman in a red coat who’s a dead ringer for Abby. As Grady falls deeper and deeper into insomnia and alcoholism, he begins to realize his being on the island is no accident—and that should make him very afraid. Through occasional chapters from before Abby’s disappearance, told from her point of view, we learn that Grady is not necessarily a reliable narrator, and the book’s slow unfolding of dread, mystery, and then truth is both creative and well-paced. Every chapter heading is an oxymoron, like the title, reminding us of the contradictions at the heart of every story.
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781250337788
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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