For readers who enjoy reminiscences of childhood in the British countryside and don't object to love-addled heroines.
McCluskey (Intrusion, 2016), who is equally at home in Los Angeles and rural England, works a few changes on the romantic mystery in her suspenseful second novel.
Advertising executive Alison, mildly dissatisfied with her marriage and job in southern California, finds an excuse to return to her British hometown when one of her childhood best friends, the rebellious Sophie, is found dead in a hotel room, presumably the victim of an accidental drug overdose. Back home, Alison meets up with another old friend, sophisticated Liz, and, more significantly, with Sophie's older brother, Matt, now married to a chilly Frenchwoman. Alison, who had a crush on Matt throughout her adolescence, finds one excuse after another to linger in England, ignoring her husband's phone calls, and Matt appears glad to spend time with her. Drawn to investigate the suspicious circumstances of Sophie's death, Alison talks to old friends and neighbors and interviews the residents and management at a shelter for abused women where Sophie briefly stayed while she was hiding out from drug dealers to whom she owed money. While readers are likely to guess before Alison does that Matt has some secret motives behind his new adoration of his sister's friend, various other members of the Savages, the old neighborhood gang of which Sophie and Matt were the ringleaders, complicate the mystery intriguingly. A strong sense of place and McCluskey's keen grasp of the ambivalence confronting an expatriate who is tempted to return to the dubious comforts of home keep the novel from seeming simply frothy. Though mystery fans may be put off by the unlikely courtroom drama that brings the novel to a climax, and the even more unlikely moments of enlightenment Alison experiences during this drama, she's a likable character, and it's easy to understand her self-delusion.
For readers who enjoy reminiscences of childhood in the British countryside and don't object to love-addled heroines.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4632-9
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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