The perils of the real and virtual worlds collide effectively in this relentlessly paced thriller.
Engaging characters meet for a game that turns deadly.
Adele Crane’s life was shattered when her seemingly wonderful husband, Miller, vanished along with millions of dollars embezzled from the tech company he founded. Adele has been struggling to make a living and raise her traumatized kids: fiercely independent Violet and sweet-natured introvert Blake. Always athletic, she’s rebuilt her confidence with half-marathons and an online presence as a health influencer. So, it makes sense when Blake suggests she apply for a streaming reality competition for influencers called Extreme Hide and Seek. Contestants are taken to some challenging location, where they hide from the Extreme team. Last one found wins $1 million. That’s how Adele finds herself on remote Falcão Island, the site of Enchantments, a luxury resort built in the 1980s but long abandoned and now about to collapse. It’s quickly apparent that the Extreme team itself is on the verge of chaos. Its founder and star, Maverick Dillan, began his career as a kid doing skate stunts for viral videos, but now he heads a hugely successful enterprise—or so it seems. Maverick is approaching middle age, and all his past injuries and current pressures are catching up with him, accelerated by the fact that on the last round of Extreme Hide and Seek, one contestant, a young woman named Chloe Miranda, hid and was never found—something that internet vigilantes won’t let him forget. Maverick’s girlfriend, no-nonsense Angeline, is holding him and the company together, but it’s tough. The team’s other three members are his oldest friends, but fractures are appearing. Adele’s competitors, a former kids’ show host called Wild Cody and a famous young mountain climber named Malinka Niqui, have problems of their own. As they assemble on Falcão for the contest, they’re warned to leave by a mysterious old woman with a paramilitary backup team—and then a huge tropical storm blows in. Weaving together multiple points of view from her believable characters, Unger plunges the reader right into a sense of dread, then skillfully ratchets up the physical terrors of the challenge while revealing one disturbing secret after another.
The perils of the real and virtual worlds collide effectively in this relentlessly paced thriller.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780778333364
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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