A female detective attempts to keep her personal life from interfering with her pursuit of a serial killer in this debut novel.
Sgt. Charlotte “Charlie” Cavanaugh’s beat is catching pedophiles in Landon City, Virginia. Between her divorce, pet parrot, and the demands of her job, Charlie doesn’t have much energy these days: “She was tired. Tired of surviving. Tired of the inhumanity she watched people inflict on one another, especially on those ‘they loved.’ She prayed no one would ever ‘love’ her that much again.” But when two of her pedophiles from previous cases end up murdered, Quantico sends an FBI agent named Jake Adams to oversee the case. Charlie resents the very idea of him, though she quickly becomes smitten by the reality of him, especially since her 15-month online relationship with an active duty service member named AJ hasn’t yielded closer contact. A third murder proves that Charlie really does have a serial killer on her hands, though she’s finding herself increasingly distracted by the presence of Jake. As they delve into each other’s pasts, they may discover what they need to catch the killer—or they might unearth something even more disturbing than the crimes they’ve already seen. Harman writes with attitude and jocularity, hewing close to Charlie’s perspective as she attempts to navigate her profession: “She was instantly enchanted by this old leathery saddle bag of a man. For the next several hours the radio was virtually silent and she hit the poor trapped Officer with every non-stupid question she could think of.” The author excels in making Charlie feel thoroughly human, with a believable backstory and a constant awareness (and anxiety) of how the men around her are perceiving her. The plot cleverly functions as an outgrowth of her vulnerabilities, and while aspects of it are rather easy to predict, the narrative does not work out in quite the way readers will expect it to. Character tension and multiple twists make up for the weaker facets of this entertaining novel. An enjoyable crime tale from a promising storyteller.
Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 349
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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