Readers will be rooting for Nate and Grace in this clever and richly enjoyable novel.
A master storyteller weaves a tale of love, pain, and sleight of hand.
Nate Larson has been in federal prison in what the feds admit is a miscarriage of justice. His first two felonies had not even resulted in prison time, but then he attempted insurance fraud to help pay for his dying daughter's cancer treatment—strike three and mandatory 25-to-life. The feds release him to take custody of his granddaughter, who, as an orphan, has gone into foster care. The hitch is that he must testify against his brother, Dima, who is suspected of child sex trafficking. The Russian Mafia has taken over Dima's grocery store and used it as a pipeline for Eastern European girls, and Dima cooperates out of fear. If Nate doesn’t testify, he goes right back to prison. Fourteen-year-old Grace Larson is stuck in “foster care hell” in Massachusetts, being shunted from one “rental parent” to another, some of whom sexually abuse her. So when a court order sends her to live with Nate, whom she doesn’t know, she is deeply suspicious. Nate shows her magic tricks he’s perfected during his confinement, leaving her slack-jawed with wonder. With one trick using Russian matryoshka dolls comes wonderful patter about a girl in a heaven-on-earth Ukrainian village called Kortelisy in 1942. Of course that’s a lie, as Ukrainians were being murdered by the millions at the time. Grace learns the tricks and becomes his talented apprentice as the feds allow him to take her on a summer tour in New England to perform magic shows. Nate plans eventually to skip to Canada—without Grace—rather than betray Dima, who is old and dying. But Nate discovers he loves her, which she finally realizes, too. So whom to betray, his brother or granddaughter? Nate and Grace are both smart and deeply sympathetic people who have felt great pain in their lives. Nate wants to bring down the real sex trafficker, who’d like nothing better than to murder Nate and pimp out Grace. The plotting is clever and the details are touching: Nate and Grace might be related to Harry Houdini, and Grace might carry the “bent BRCA gene” that killed her mother and grandmother. Dima and Nate were the only survivors when the Nazis wiped out Kortelisy. The story twists, turns, and—presto! A brilliant solution.
Readers will be rooting for Nate and Grace in this clever and richly enjoyable novel.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-57962-542-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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