After two in England, French brings her third to the US—an elegant, chilling take on love, murder, and obsession. Alice Loudon is young, brainy, and beautiful. She has a comfortable London apartment, a satisfactory lover, and an enviable job on the science side of industry. The direction of her life seems already settled, then, but it isn’t. Crossing a street on her way to work one morning, she locks eyes with a tall, unbelievably handsome, stranger—and suddenly she’s lost. When she leaves her building later that day, he’s waiting for her. When he asks her to go with him, she does. He’s Adam Tallis, a celebrated mountaineer, a hero, having recently saved several lives during a notorious and doomed climbing expedition. The two make love explosively. Not just good sex, or great sex, Alice thinks, but “obliterating sex.” She also thinks she might be going mad. Whatever the reality, she can’t stop what’s happening to her. Gone in an eye-blink are the comfortable apartment and the satisfactory lover. Two months from the time of their first meeting, Alice and Adam are married, but almost at once Alice feels uneasy, afraid. Who is this man she’s entangled with? Is the violence she senses in him controllable? What about those women in his past, those women now no longer alive? Three accidental deaths? At what point does coincidence become something else—like menacing? Reluctantly, Alice turns detective. The truth is her survival tool, and she needs it as much as Adam needs her not to find it. Still passionately in love, they eye each other warily, they maneuver around each other, and when finally they clash, it’s shattering. Tight plotting, impeccable prose, fleshed-out characters: writer to welcome and watch.(Film rights to Montecito Picture Co.; Literary Guild featured alternate, Doubleday Book Club, Mystery Guild) . . . Furutani, Dale JADE PALACE VENDETTA Morrow (256 pp.) $23.00 Jul. 1999 ISBN: 0-688-15818-8 Jade Palace Vendetta ($23.00; Jul.; 256 pp.; 0-688-15818-8): The second installment in Furutani’s samurai trilogy (Death at the Crossroads, 1998) finds freelance warrior Matsuyama Kaze interrupting his search for his dead lord’s son to save merchant Hishigawa Satoyasu from murderous bandits—and then getting plenty of chances to regret the act of courage that’s landed him in a stew of deception and treachery.
Pub Date: July 7, 1999
ISBN: 0-89296-697-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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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