Crime fiction doesn't get any more enjoyable.
Boston FBI agent Rob Barrett gets himself sent to Port Hope, Maine, the town where his grandfather lived and where he spent his childhood summers, to help crack the case of a young couple's murder, which appears to have been committed by a childhood antagonist of Barrett's.
To the surprise of local cops who haven't been able to get 22-year-old drug addict Kimberly Crepeaux to utter a word about the murders of Jackie Pelletier and Ian Kelly since she turned herself in and admitted she was part of it, interrogation specialist Barrett quickly gets her to open up about everything. She swears the killer was Mathias Burke—despite his reputation as "the paragon of the peninsula"—a local man who had built up a large landscaping and caretaking business. Kimmy says Mathias forced her and her friend Cass Odom to help him dump the bodies in a pond, but when divers can't find any corpses, evidence points to another suspect, and a humiliated Barrett is forced to admit Kimmy must be lying. He's reassigned to Montana—to the taunting delight of Mathias. Months later, after having received repeated phone messages from Kimmy, who's just out of jail, and from Jackie Pelletier's pleading father, Barrett returns to Maine to resume his investigation on the sly. There, he has his eyes opened to the lethal toll of a heroin blend that was responsible for Cass' death three days after Jackie and Ian's murders. The only questions are how Mathias is connected to all those deaths and what price Barrett will pay in his pursuit of the truth. Is Koryta capable of telling a less-than-gripping tale? This book may not be as ambitious as his best efforts (including Rise the Dark, 2016), but it is flawless, unpredictable storytelling streaked with his usual dark undercurrents.
Crime fiction doesn't get any more enjoyable.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-29393-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
PROFILES
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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