A tour de force whose detective chapters pale beside its escape-from-certain-death chapters.
Game warden Mike Bowditch’s 12th adventure sends him hurtling through the Maine woods into the past, just like his first 11.
Imperious Rhodesian-born widow Mariëtte Chamberlain is convinced that the death four years ago of her father-in-law, professor Eben Chamberlain, was murder, not the accident Sgt. Marc Rivard’s investigation pronounced it after Chamberlain’s decomposing corpse was pulled from the Androscoggin River. Now that Rivard has lost his job as a warden, she requests—no, demands—that Bowditch launch his own inquiry. This can’t possibly end well, not only because Bowditch must deal with both the client from hell and a resentful ex-boss he was never close to, but because the opening scene has already made Bowditch the victim of a snowy act of sabotage that sends his Jeep plummeting into the river with him and Shadow, his companion wolf, inside. Shuttling back and forth between this calamity and the steps that led up to it, Doiron shows Bowditch dutifully questioning Arlo Burch, the last person to see Chamberlain alive, and Bruce Jewett, the hunting companion Mariëtte Chamberlain is convinced was the professor’s secret lover and killer, while alternating chapters follow him as he escapes the sinking Jeep, makes his way from the freezing river, and struggles to warm himself before he succumbs to either hypothermia or whomever ran him off the road. Just in case the past doesn’t look menacing enough, Doiron, like a dog who can’t let go of a favored bone, brings back the criminal Dow family as yet another threat.
A tour de force whose detective chapters pale beside its escape-from-certain-death chapters.Pub Date: June 29, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2502-3510-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
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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