Though this book is the end of a trilogy, there's every indication its heroine will be back.
A psychic searches for a missing teenager on the Big Island of Hawaii in the final volume of a trilogy (The Shimmering Road, 2017, etc.).
Readers expecting a ripped-from-the-headlines account of Kilauea's eruptions may be disappointed, though Volcanoes National Park is the setting for this novel’s deepest dives, literally if not thematically. Our heroine, psychic sleuth Charlie, needs to escape the media feeding frenzy surrounding her latest clairvoyance-assisted rescue of a missing child. A "Girls’ Week" vacation in Hawaii with best friend Rae seems just the ticket. However, the trip immediately draws Charlie into another missing person case, that of Lise Nakagawa, 16-year-old daughter of Victor Nakagawa, a volcanologist at the park. In lucid dreams, Charlie sees through the eyes of a menacing male who approaches Lise as she lies vulnerable on a hammock. (This is unusual for Charlie, since she usually inhabits the victim.) Ostensibly interviewing Victor for a travel magazine, Charlie questions him about Lise and why he seems so unperturbed by her absence. Lise and her identical twin sister, Jocelyn, attend a progressive private school, and though Jocelyn is studious and Stanford-bound, Lise is a wild child forever getting in trouble. The desultory police investigation has targeted Elijah, Lise’s boyfriend, with whom she broke up just before her disappearance. Elijah is the middle son of Naomi Yoon, who is rumored to be Victor’s lover. The Yoons appear to be the last remnants of an oppressive cult. In a comedic set piece, the two middle-aged “girls” go undercover with Lise’s slacker friends, Brayden and Frankie, whose pidgin dialect is faithfully if somewhat questionably reproduced. Late in the game we learn that for the Nakagawas and the Yoons, dysfunction is the best-case scenario. Since Young’s overall tone is lighthearted, such unforeshadowed dark turns may give readers whiplash. Insights into Hawaiian culture and class divides, ample volcano lore, and Charlie’s wry voice keep us reading, but in the end we hope for a less uneven follow-up.
Though this book is the end of a trilogy, there's every indication its heroine will be back.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-17402-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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