An intriguing but rambling tale about a woman and a psychopath.
A vulnerable woman falls into the predatory clutches of a smooth-talking physician in this novel.
When Mary fatefully meets Dr. Drake Lucifer Bates, she muses: “The name ‘Drake’ makes me think of a dragon. Oh no! ‘Lucifer’ I know from my faith, and it reminds me of the fallen angel sent to hell by God. The devil? Holy cow! Goosebumps run chillingly along my spine, but I don’t know if they are good ones or bad ones.” At the time, she is a “fragile personality”—her marriage of more than 20 years to her husband, Paul, seems destined for divorce, the result of his deceitful infidelity. She is also suffering from terrible chronic pain in the aftermath of back surgery. When Mary encounters Drake at his clinic in Spain, her original impressions are contradictory—on the one hand, he is monstrously inappropriate, unabashedly flirtatious and visibly aroused by her. But she is drawn to his “spicy body,” his empathy, and charisma. She wonders if he can save her from a life of emotional disappointments: “For me, he’s the genuine dream of a man, a spellbinding phantom of my shining white saviour on a white rescue horse.” But she begins to detect the “deep darkness of his evil agenda” and his rampant dishonesty and even starts to suspect he is a sociopath. Drake turns out to be a malicious “puppet master” and not only uses Mary for sexual exploitation, but also convinces her to leave her husband, all the while bilking tens of thousands of dollars from her.
Stark’s entire novel is written in the style of a memoir, with Mary serving as both protagonist and narrator, conveying her lament with breathless melodrama assisted by an infinite arsenal of exclamation points. The author is at her best exploring the way an intelligent, even skeptical woman could be so thoroughly deceived by such a clumsy, transparent huckster. But the plot is meanderingly ill disciplined and often reads like an interminable, furious jeremiad. Mary complains for pages and pages in the most hyperventilated register about her woes, and that is essentially the crux of the tale. There is no element of suspense—Mary announces from the beginning that Drake is a con man and she is his dupe. Still, the weakest feature of Stark’s book, the first installment of a trilogy, is the writing, which seems pitched at one tone—screaming. Here, Mary is about to succumb to Drake’s incessant advances: “Shame on me! I’m a dead drunken fish on his hook! In my half-drunk condition, I’ve left my brain in the last glass of whisky. Oops! I know I must say no, but I’m only human and have desires! So, I’m about to fall right into his cunning, sexy plan to seduce me, as his gentle caresses [sic] and while he speaks sensitive words in my ears.” As a result, this is an exhausting story—the author’s prose exacts a heavy toll on readers who make it to the end of the work.
An intriguing but rambling tale about a woman and a psychopath.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-459360-3
Page Count: 348
Publisher: XlibrisUK
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2021
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
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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