Breathtaking vistas and hallucinatory visions weighed down by pedestrian villainy and narrative expediency.
A fractured family, secrets, and a big bag of cocaine lead to short, sharp violence in the Colorado wilderness.
This follow-up to Bearskin (2018) is marked by many of the same traits that made McLaughlin’s Edgar Award–winning debut so rewarding, not least the spare, menacing prose depicting a man seeking redemption in isolation. But while the two books’ mechanics are similar, the idiosyncrasies of the heroes here don’t inspire much sympathy, and the deus ex machina acrobatics setting events in motion fray the book’s credibility. The heart of the story lies in two siblings, dissimilar as oil and water yet inextricably tied together. Summer Girard is the reasonable, responsible one who, along with uncles Jeremy and Darwin, is holding down the fort on a struggling cattle ranch near Durango, Colorado. Her brother, Bowman, is a whole other animal, a near-feral drifter whose notions of his one-quarter Native American heritage (“tribe unknown”) combined with nerve damage from exposure to fish toxins have left him paranoid and troubled. Two precipitating events harden Summer’s resolve to keep her ranch and bring Bowman out from where he's hiding in Costa Rica. First, road-tripping lawyer Sam Hay and his pal Mac realize that Melissa, the young woman they picked up in a cafe, might land them in big trouble with a Mexican cartel over the large backpack full of coke she claims to have stolen from her boyfriend. Simultaneously, Summer discovers that her grandfather Martin has left her and Bowman a secret stash of money they can only claim together at a bank in Denver. While Summer reluctantly agrees to protect Sam when she finds him looking for water on her land, having been deserted by Mac and Melissa, a mobster colleague of her grandfather’s named Jake Salifano gets word of her inheritance and dispatches a violent, armed prison gang to take back his ill-gotten gains. Stylistically, McLaughlin’s novels recall Taylor Sheridan’s films, most notably Wind River and his adaptation of Michael Koryta’s Those Who Wish Me Dead. The prose and the setting remain arthouse cool, but the triggering menace and nominal twists are strictly B-movie material.
Breathtaking vistas and hallucinatory visions weighed down by pedestrian villainy and narrative expediency.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781250821003
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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