A tightly woven medical thriller fusing justice for abuse victims with the tapped power of the mind.
Goodison’s (The Jigsaw Man, 2015, etc.) second volume in the St. Augustus Chronicles centers on two half sisters who may be psychically linked.
In this family melodrama, an elderly driver strikes an 8-year-old girl named Chelsa who’s walking to school. The child becomes comatose, suffering permanent brain damage. In a classic war of wills over the welfare of their ailing daughter, Tim and Melanie Moran feud and eventually separate over a critical decision to terminate her life support. God-fearing Tim’s insistence on keeping his daughter alive prevails, but ultimately drives a wedge between him and his unscrupulous wife, who has been busy cheating on him with her boss to gain a job promotion. The couple separate, even as Melanie announces she is pregnant with a child that is not her husband’s. While Chelsa seems destined to live out the remainder of her years in a vegetative state, Melanie gives birth to a second daughter, Sienna, though the girl becomes plagued with mysterious fainting spells. Sienna’s malady confounds local Portland, Oregon, psychiatrist Rand Morrissey, who, from this early point in the swiftly paced novel, makes for an appealing hero. He anchors the plot, which develops further as hypnosis sessions find Sienna communicating through Chelsa’s disturbing memories. Meanwhile, Chelsa has been undergoing nerve stimulation treatments as a last-ditch effort to revive her brain functions, though it is Sienna who delves into her half sister’s mind and begins reenacting the violent physical abuse she endured. The varied histories of characters like Melanie and Morrissey add depth to the solidly written story. The doctor begins doggedly investigating Chelsa’s family’s past to verify the child abuse allegations stemming from Sienna’s hypnotically induced testimonies. And Melanie begins to unravel and falsely accuse the men in her life of random acts of abuse. The narrative gets even busier when Goodison incorporates arcane themes of human spiritual rebirth and the Christian theological theory of Limbo into the action, which culminates when Chelsa and Sienna are brought together in the same room. Though the psychic phenomena may be a stretch for some readers, the author does an admirable job of humanizing everything else in her rousing novel, making the entire ordeal an eerie possibility in real life.
A tightly woven medical thriller fusing justice for abuse victims with the tapped power of the mind.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-945136-04-7
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Sheffield Publications
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2016
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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