An entertaining tale about perseverance that is perhaps better classified as a satisfying mystery than a romance.
An up-and-coming attorney meets a mysterious man and begins to question the life she has built for herself in this suspenseful story.
Novelist Wurtenbaugh’s (A Prophet Without Honor, 2017, etc.) tale opens as junior legal associate Adele Jansen is staffed on a high-profile matter at the law firm where she has been making a name for herself. Her slight build and youthful appearance cause her to be underestimated, but Adele continually outpaces her male peers. Everything changes when one of the firm’s clients, a publishing company, seeks Adele’s help in communicating with a potentially uncooperative author. When Adele meets Tom Newcombe, the author in question, sparks fly. After a meeting filled with deep discussion about esoteric intellectual topics, Adele is irrevocably smitten. But she questions whether there is any room in her life and career for a relationship. As she begins to think of Tom as her true priority, she learns he has disappeared, seemingly without a trace. Worse yet, Tom’s few acquaintances that Adele locates warn her to avoid him. Adele doesn’t believe that Tom could be bad news, and thus she begins a quest to discover as much as possible about the real Tom Newcombe. When answers finally emerge, will Adele be able to accept them? By doling out mysterious drips and drabs about Newcombe’s past, the author successfully builds tension in the story that increases steadily. Wurtenbaugh also provides many interesting details about a wide array of ancillary subjects, ranging from office politics and art to computer programming and mathematical theory. Although these oft-gratuitous, extensive details become cumbersome, impeding what is otherwise a fast-paced narrative, the story is redeemed by the many vivid and engrossing scenes of Adele’s astute sleuthing. By offering readers just the right kinds of clues about Tom as the truth slowly unfurls, Wurtenbaugh delivers an absorbing tale about checkered pasts and new commitments.
An entertaining tale about perseverance that is perhaps better classified as a satisfying mystery than a romance.Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 826
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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