An enthralling tale, but the genuine mystery involves the protagonist, a spellbinding enigma from beginning to end.
A divorcé’s 5-year-old daughter vanishes during a weekend visit, turning his apartment neighbors into suspects in Southern’s (Killing Sound, 2014, etc.) thriller.
A Britain-based man, whose first-person narrative never reveals his name, has been living in a flat since his divorce, his likewise unnamed daughter with him Friday through Sunday. The protective father keeps his daughter close, so he’s understandably upset when she slips onto the elevator alone when he’s momentarily distracted. He quickly heads to Minus One, the elevator’s designation for the basement and a button-selection that fascinates his curious daughter. The girl’s not there, and the police have no luck finding her. One officer, however, claims there are signs that someone else was in the basement, so that the girl isn’t merely lost—someone’s likely abducted her. Suddenly the neighbors in the man’s apartment building, most of whom he recognizes only by sight, are dubious and potential kidnappers. It isn’t long before police are arresting some of the same people the man’s passed by on the stairs. But the worried father may not be what he appears. He’s been lying to authorities and, he shamefully admits, to his readers as well. He’ll have to decide if maintaining his secret is the right way to go, or if it’ll simply make things worse. Though the story’s mystery is sound, the author’s true focus is the narrator. He’s an intricate, multidimensional character whose initial sympathy readers may find waning as the story progresses. He can be insightful; he’s “always on the defensive” for fear people of differing ethnicities will construe anything he does as racist. Other times, though, he’s outright offensive, asserting women in general “need the constant bolstering and ego inflation to compensate for the lack of collagen and silicone.” A shocking twist happens about a third into the novel; it’s best left unspoiled and demands a reexamination of the girl’s disappearance (Southern smartly plays the scene a second time). But the protagonist is riveting throughout. The unsavory atmosphere, too, retains tension, primarily the recurring scene of the seedy basement, where all the tenants dump their trash via chutes.
An enthralling tale, but the genuine mystery involves the protagonist, a spellbinding enigma from beginning to end.Pub Date: June 1, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 245
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2016
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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