A wild, well-written novel that fuels suspicions about what might be going on in our oh-so-unbalanced world.
An uninhibited thriller with a dash of social commentary where the devil is in the details.
Fiona Dunn is a pisser of a character—a go-for-the-throat marketer whose suspicions about her live-in, Justin, get her into a spot of trouble. She trails Justin and sees him enter a taxi with another woman while supposedly traveling out of town on business. The answer of course is to go to a bar to drink away her sorrows, where she is plied with drinks by a dark, charming stranger. Scratch, the pickup, is also an intriguingly crafted character—a dark force with a wry sense of humor, he's a rather likable guy until he tells Fiona exactly who he is. He is, it turns out, the devil, Satan, real name unpronounceable, and he strikes a deal for Fiona’s soul that gives her the power of invisibility at will, so she can spy on her wayward partner. This has to be the archetype of a bar tryst gone bad. Scratch controls a cadre of dead souls in Oakland who meet in a converted church to discuss their woes and plot their escape, under the direction of Alejandro, a photographer who charms Fiona after seeing her dark pallor—the sign of the damned. Scratch has sealed the deal with all these wayward souls by giving them a business card stating their date of soul-selling and a blank space titled “Favor.” When the time comes, the blank fills mysteriously with a deed and instructions, and the novel turns gruesome in the acts. The implication is that the mass murders, the unconscionable acts of terror of our contemporary times (and all time) are the result of selfish deals with the devil—these acts are Favors, the payment due the devil. Fiona commits her obligated soul to turning the tables on Scratch and righting many wrongs. The countdown to Fiona’s Favor is a thriller of a chase with a wicked but not-so-elevating ending.
A wild, well-written novel that fuels suspicions about what might be going on in our oh-so-unbalanced world.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1093-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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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