An engaging, well-plotted thriller with themes of race, family, and forgiveness.
An African American mother tries to find out who killed her son while knowing she might become another victim.
In Osborne’s thriller, Vera Moon discovers her grown son, Charlie, on a blood-stained mattress in the apartment they share. She forces “her gaze away from his. Only then she saw the rest of his body, two feet away, severed from his head.” Months later, the police haven’t found Charlie’s killer. Vera considers contacting the Black Lives Matter movement for help, but her daughter Liza’s “whiter-than-white” ex-husband, Sam, reminds her, “The police didn’t kill Charlie and there’s no evidence his ethnicity played a role.” Charlie was having an affair with Erika Smith, who is White, married, and, in Vera’s opinion, “devoid of a moral compass.” Charlie, a freelance photographer, also was doing some sort of business with Erika’s husband, Griff. After Vera and Liza are hurt in a multicar hit-and-run accident, Erika reveals Griff was a passenger in another vehicle in the same wreck. She suggests someone arranged to hurt her husband and Vera because of “something illegal” Charlie and Griff were involved in. Dani, a troubled, 25-year-old “Black-Irish” woman who witnessed the wreck, believes that it was indeed intentional. She helps Vera at the scene of the accident and visits her afterward in the hospital. The two women eventually form a bond, regardless of the differences in their ages, races, and temperaments, and team up to try to uncover Charlie’s killer. In this engrossing novel, Osborne excels at characterization. A macho friend of Dani’s, for example, is the type to carry, not roll, a wheeled suitcase. And main character Vera acknowledges she has “failed at so many things—wife, mother, grandmother, businesswoman.” Although there is violence—the book, after all, starts with a decapitation—there is also humor. When Erika tells Vera she weighs 110 pounds, the protagonist flatly responds: “One hundred and twenty.” Pacing, dialogue, intrigue, and attention to detail are all first-rate.
An engaging, well-plotted thriller with themes of race, family, and forgiveness.Pub Date: July 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68-433732-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.
Following the mysterious disappearance of his wife, a struggling London novelist journeys to a remote Scottish island to try to get his mojo back—but all, of course, is not what it seems.
Grady Green hits the pinnacle of his publishing career on the same night that his life goes off the rails—first his book lands on the New York Times bestseller list, and then his wife, Abby, goes missing on her way home. A year later, Grady is a mere shadow of his former self: out of money and out of ideas. So, when his agent, Abby’s godmother, suggests that he spend some time on the Isle of Amberly, in a log cabin left to her by one of her writers, it seems as good a plan as any. With free housing for himself and his dog and a beautiful, distraction-free environment, maybe he can finally complete the next novel. But from the very beginning, Grady’s experiences with Amberly seem weird, if not downright ominous: As a visitor, he’s not allowed to bring his car onto the island; the local businesses are only open for a few hours at a time; and there are no birds. At all. Not to mention the skeletal hand he finds buried under the floorboards of the cabin, the creepy harmonica music in the woods, and the occasional sighting of a woman in a red coat who’s a dead ringer for Abby. As Grady falls deeper and deeper into insomnia and alcoholism, he begins to realize his being on the island is no accident—and that should make him very afraid. Through occasional chapters from before Abby’s disappearance, told from her point of view, we learn that Grady is not necessarily a reliable narrator, and the book’s slow unfolding of dread, mystery, and then truth is both creative and well-paced. Every chapter heading is an oxymoron, like the title, reminding us of the contradictions at the heart of every story.
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781250337788
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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