A timely thriller that will stay with the reader long after the last page has been turned.
White supremacy and family secrets fuel the latest Southern gothic thriller by a two-time Edgar Award–winning author.
Imogene Coulter has spent most of her life in Simmonsville, Georgia, a small town named for her mother’s family—a family known for its connection to the Ku Klux Klan. Imogene’s great-great-grandfather helped to revive the Klan in 1915. Edison Coulter—the man Imogene calls Daddy—led the Knights of the Southern Georgia Order. Her brother, Eddie, her sister, Jo Lynne, and Jo Lynne’s husband, Garland, are active members. Imogene has tried to distance herself from this legacy, and, for her mother’s sake, she has tried to make peace with the full breadth and depth of her family’s cruelty and corruption. Then Edison dies and Imogene finds a small child living in a boarded-up house on the family's farm. As she struggles to find the identity of this child, she uncovers a host of other crimes. The closer she gets to the truth, the harder she has to fight to protect herself and everyone she loves against competing factions within the Klan. Imogene finally discovers that her terrible heritage is something she must fight against rather than repress. Roy (The Disappearing, 2018, etc.) takes her time weaving in backstory and letting her characters reveal themselves, and thriller fans who read for plot might get a bit impatient. But those who settle in will be rewarded with a riveting mystery, brilliantly crafted and weighted with real-world resonance. The fact that hate groups are resurgent in the United States emerges as an essential element of this novel. The narrative is interspersed with brief historical notes beginning with the origins of the KKK—and ending with the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
A timely thriller that will stay with the reader long after the last page has been turned.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4196-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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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