A smart and indelible crime tale with skillfully interwoven storylines.
In this fifth installment of a thriller series, a Colorado hunting guide and sleuth searches for a missing friend and contends with homicidal smugglers.
While on horseback in the Flat Tops Wilderness, guide Allison Coil stumbles on a man tied to a tree. Nearby is the carcass of a deer that someone has shot out of season and inexplicably left behind. The man won’t tell her anything, other than claiming he and some unnamed others survived a plane crash. She leaves him there and returns with local authorities, only to discover the man gone. The group, however, witnesses a low-flying plane pass by, and Allison follows it. The plane is heading in the same direction as a double set of footprints near the tree. Soon joined by her boyfriend, Colin McKee, Allison also searches for her friend Devo, who leads a tribe of devolutionists and has recently vanished. Meanwhile, Allison’s best friend, Trudy Heath, runs into unexpected trouble while shooting a TV pilot with Sam Shelton, an ex-rock star-turned-tomato farmer. And Trudy’s reporter boyfriend, Duncan Bloom, hopes to quash his debt by investing in marijuana, a risky endeavor even with pot now legalized in Colorado. But the greatest threat for Allison and her friends may be the murderous individuals interested in whatever the planes were hauling. Though not all of the subplots in the novel merge, Stevens’ (Lake of Fire, 2015, etc.) story is cohesive. Trudy, for example, while entangled with Sam separately, lends Allison a helping hand by gathering information from Devo’s sister-in-law. There are a few convincing twists, most notably the unraveling of a conspiracy and the surprising names involved. Nevertheless, the author heightens suspense with the early unmasking of a particularly brutal villain. The brisk narrative is bolstered by stellar dialogue that characters bounce back and forth. In one exchange, Trudy says humans are “dumb animals.” When Sam counters with “smart enough to distill whiskey, make beer, refine coca leaves and figure out cannabis,” Trudy simply reiterates: “Because we’re animals.”
A smart and indelible crime tale with skillfully interwoven storylines.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Third Line Press
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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