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THE DROWNED

Excellent writing and a clever plot make this one stand out.

Irish author Banville brings back characters he originally wrote about under the name Benjamin Black.

Banville’s latest 1950s-set crime novel opens with Denton Wymes, a recluse who lives in a caravan in rural Ireland with his dog, stumbling upon an unusual sight: a Mercedes SL idling in a field, its headlamps on and no driver in sight. A man named Armitage accosts Wymes, saying that his wife, who had been driving the car, has gone missing and may have “drowned herself.” Wymes is suspicious of Armitage, whose affect seems off: “It seemed a piece of bad acting, but then, Wymes told himself, that’s mostly how people behave when there’s a crisis and they’re distraught.” DI St John Strafford arrives from Dublin to investigate, quickly sussing out that nothing about the case will be straightforward—Armitage is slippery and unpredictable, Wymes is a convicted child molester, and something seems amiss about the couple whose rental house Armitage and Wymes went to for help. Meanwhile, Strafford has his own problems: His separated wife wants a divorce, and his lover—who happens to be the daughter of his pathologist colleague, Quirke—is pregnant. And when two bodies are discovered, he is faced with an increasing sense of urgency. Strafford and Quirke return as characters from Banville’s previous crime novels, and Armitage played a large role in his most recent book, The Lock-Up (2023). These are compelling people: Strafford with his emotional unavailability (“The fact was, he did not understand himself, or Phoebe, or anyone. The vagaries of the human heart baffled him”) and Quirke with his brooding depression (“He stayed away from people as much as possible. This was a loneliness company couldn’t cure”). As for the mystery at the heart of the book: Banville remains a master of suspense; it’s not easy to stop turning the pages until the novel’s genuinely surprising end. This is yet another fine thriller from an author at the top of his game.

Excellent writing and a clever plot make this one stand out.

Pub Date: today

ISBN: 9781335000590

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Hanover Square Press

Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: today

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DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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

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HERE ONE MOMENT

A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.

What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?

In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).

A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024

ISBN: 9780593798607

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024

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