A light story with nice twists and imperfect but strong female characters.
A ride-share driver might make much more than her usual fare in this humorous Chicago-based thriller.
Paula Wilson is an artist by training and a Drive Away Car ride-share driver by necessity. One night, she picks up a fare who calls himself “Lotti,” whom she fails to recognize as Grammy Award–winning pop singer Ryan Hooks. Paula sees that he’s gone to meet a beautiful woman, and when she spots his face on TV the next day and realizes who she'd had in her car, she also realizes he must be cheating on his jealous wife. Paula sees an opportunity to help her husband, Keith, who is wheelchair-bound because of an auto accident. Paula had found a phone on the car’s back seat, and she now realizes it belongs to Ryan. An operation that might allow Keith to walk again would cost $180,000 that they don’t have. Paula “would do whatever it took” to help Keith get back on his feet, but she is an honest woman in her own mind: When she finds a passenger’s left-behind phone she usually waits two weeks to see if it’s claimed before selling it online. Not with Hooks, though, because she knows his secret. She meets him backstage at a concert and lets him know she has his phone and that maybe he will give her a $180,000 “reward.” “The telephone and my silence” might be coercion, she tells herself, but “Hell, I’d call it a suggestion.” She wants the reader to know she’s a good person, that she only lies “about the tiny, unimportant things,” such as her identity when she meets Hooks’ secret lover, Emma Bentley, at a dog park. Emma invites her—“Chris”—to “a little dinner party,” where Paula gets soused senseless (she really likes her wine) and a woman gets murdered. Detective Claire Puhl leads the homicide investigation and tries to decide how seriously to take Paula.
A light story with nice twists and imperfect but strong female characters.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4926-6800-8
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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
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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