Plot, reasonably clever. Setting, nicely done. Characters, two-dimensional stereotypes, but you can't have everything.
Ever since college, these nine friends have remained close. This year, only eight of them will go home from their New Years' party.
While Miranda and Katie are childhood friends and bonded with Julien, Mark, Samira, Giles, Nick, and Bo while they were at Oxford or soon after, Emma didn't become part of the group until she married Mark just a few years ago. For that reason, she has gone all out to plan this year's New Year’s gathering at a remote Scottish hunting lodge. "Very exclusive," she reports. "They only let four parties stay there each year." She's had the place stocked with truffles, foie gras, and other delicacies, and Miranda and Julien have brought a case of Dom Pérignon. As we turn the first page of Foley's (The Invitation, 2016, etc.) debut thriller after several historical novels, it is Jan. 2, 2019. Heather, the manager of Loch Corrin, receives a breathless visit from Doug, the rough-hewn and scary/sexy gamekeeper. He has found the body of the missing guest. We won't know which guest that is, of course, for quite some time. The tense tale of this ill-fated reunion is told in flashbacks from several different characters' perspectives, each with a different angle and a different dark secret in his or her past, as is classic in this form of the whodunit. It seems likely that the killer comes from the ranks of the guests—there's a good bit of interpersonal tension, much of it generated by the extreme gorgeousness of Miranda, the queen bee of the crowd. Her relationship with her husband, Julien, is surely not the bed of roses the others believe, and her so-called best friend, Katie, seems to hate her guts. On the other hand, there's mention of a serial killer on the loose in the Highlands, so who's that sneaking around in the woods?
Plot, reasonably clever. Setting, nicely done. Characters, two-dimensional stereotypes, but you can't have everything.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-286890-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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