Not even Hamburger Helper could rescue this overdone hash.
Johansen (Deadlock, 2009, etc.) stirs psychics, an apprentice vampire and some unsettled ghosts into a bubbling pot of balderdash.
Near the end of forensic sculptor Eve Duncan’s latest case, she turns to Hamburger Helper to make dinner. It’s one of the few descriptive details here, and an apt one for a tale concocted from fragments, clichés, clipped sentences and stilted dialogue. Back in Atlanta (which for all the sense of place Johansen provides might as well be the lost continent of Atlantis), Eve is contacted by a nearly hysterical Megan Blair, who fears that when she clutched Eve during a recent investigation, she may have transmitted psychic powers. Yes, Megan did. Eve’s daughter Bonnie, missing for nine years, now appears to her periodically for a cloying moment or two. And Eve’s partner, Joe Quinn, has apparently also caught the ESP bug: He begins to see Nancy Jo Norris, a senator’s daughter whose nude body has been discovered, her throat slit. However skeptical of the supernatural, stalwart Joe, a former FBI agent, knows a potentially good source when he sees one, so he begrudgingly teams with Nancy Jo to find her murderer. The culprit is Kevin Jelak, who aspires to full-fledged vampire status. To achieve that, he must find and ingest high-quality, high-protein blood, and he thinks Eve and her adopted daughter Jane offer just that. As a calling card, Kevin leaves a goblet filled with blood he sucked from Nancy Jo in Eve’s refrigerator. In the meantime, he takes several other female victims, their blood at least good enough to keep him going. Devoted to her mother, Jane offers to serve as bait to draw Jelak into the open. Eve will have none of it. She will place herself on the altar of possible sacrifice. Some suspense arises as we wait to see how much more preposterous the plot will become.
Not even Hamburger Helper could rescue this overdone hash.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-36812-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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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