A claustrophobic, tense tale of destructive desire.
A crew team infatuation turns into a deadly, yearslong obsession in Deering’s latest thriller.
Brenna Riley and Dennis Griffin both had controlling fathers, and both end up on the Stanford crew team. Brenna is a coxswain, in charge of steering the boat and commanding the rowers. Dennis is a stroke—a lead rower—and a man known for his intensity and ice-blue eyes. Brenna is drawn to Dennis but also a little afraid of him. After the two hook up following a meet in San Diego, Brenna decides that’s all she needs from him. Dennis, however, continues to harbor feelings that increasingly border on obsession. After graduation, Brenna marries another teammate, while Dennis—unmoored when he fails to make the Olympic rowing team—quits the sport and turns his attention on his old crush. An unplanned visit to Brenna’s new house leads to a second sexual encounter, one in which Brenna’s consent isn’t given. She gives birth to a daughter, Sadie, unsure if the father is Dennis or her husband. Meanwhile, Dennis marries a waitress who looks just like Brenna and takes a job as a handyman for Brenna’s wealthy father. It seems that Dennis may be hellbent on either possessing Brenna or destroying her life, even if it means resorting to murder. Deering’s understated prose captures both Dennis’s methodical madness and the horror of the other characters as they come to recognize it. Here Brenna finds mementos Dennis has kept in a locked briefcase: “Brenna struggled to control her shaking hand and get the key into the lock. She peered inside and saw an odd collection of items: a tangle of dark hair, a lighter, two framed photos…She examined the photos and saw that they were from her wedding and the San Diego Crew Classic.” Though some aspects of the novel strain credulity, Deering’s command of the creepiness will keep readers engrossed.
A claustrophobic, tense tale of destructive desire.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781647425074
Page Count: 280
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A chilling tale of disaster, bravery, and sacrifice.
One disaster triggers another in a cascade of perils.
A commercial pilot suffers a widow-maker heart attack at 35,000 feet over Minnesota with almost 300 passengers and crew aboard. The copilot is trapped in the lavatory. A flight attendant struggles hopelessly with the controls as the jet noses downward. There will be no miracles. The first two chapters of Newman's latest are the most frightening imaginable, with everything that could possibly go wrong going wrong. The plane clips a power line and shatters, with the largest piece hitting the Clover Hill nuclear power plant. The impact cracks a wall in a building containing water that cools spent fuel rods. If those rods overheat, radiation flowing into the adjacent Mississippi could turn the river basin into a dead zone all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. Primary electrical distribution is severed. Debris blocks roads. A flaming wing crushes a family’s car. The novel is aptly named but for the lack of a plural: This string of worst-case scenarios is expertly designed to scare the bejesus out of us. And yet it all seems plausible. Luckily, there are heroes, but the reader had best not get emotionally invested in all of them, as they pay a heavy price. Meanwhile, the pool is losing water that could cause a fuel rod fire and an “uncontrollable spread of invisible, toxic, cancer-causing particulates” that would be “in everything we touched, ate, drank, and breathed, for…for forever.” The accident may have massive global implications, and the clock is ticking. “Nuclear waste is toxic for millennia,” a scientist warns the U.S. president. So brace yourselves, readers. This one is frightening.
A chilling tale of disaster, bravery, and sacrifice.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780316576796
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
Red-hot storytelling.
Two master storytellers create one explosive thriller.
Mauna Loa is going to blow within days—“the biggest damn eruption in a century”—and John “Mac” MacGregor of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory leads a team trying to fend off catastrophe. Can they vent the volcano? Divert the flow of blistering hot lava? The city of Hilo is but a few miles down the hill from the world’s largest active volcano and will likely be in the path of a 15-foot-high wall of molten menace racing toward them at 50 miles an hour. “You live here, you always worry about the big one,” Mac says, and this could be it. There’s much more, though. The U.S. Army swoops in, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff personally “drafts” Mac into the Army. Then Mac learns the frightening secret of the Army’s special interest in Mauna Loa, and suddenly the stakes fly far, far beyond Hilo. Perhaps they can save the world, but the odds don’t look good. Readers will sympathize with Mac, who teaches surfing to troubled teens and for whom “taking chances is part of his damned genetic code.” But no one takes chances like the aerial cowboy Jake Rogers and the photographer who hires him to fly over the smoldering, burbling, rock-spitting hellhole. Some of the action scenes will make readers’ eyes pop as the tension continues to build. As with any good thriller, there’s a body count, but not all thrillers have blackened corpses surfing lava flows. The story is the brainchild of the late Crichton, who did a great deal of research but died in 2008 before he could finish the novel. His widow handed the project to James Patterson, who weaves Crichton’s work into a seamless summer read.
Red-hot storytelling.Pub Date: June 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780316565073
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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