A smart, atmospheric novel with a hole at its core.
A strong-willed, highly seductive female virologist is found dead at a biotech firm's isolated research center in an unnamed place suggestive of Scandinavia. Myles, an investigator with a shadowy government agency, is on the case.
The biotech company's headquarters are in Ondstrand House, a one-time boarding school with a sordid past. The dead woman is Allegra Stans, who during her seven years with the firm seems to have slept with everyone on campus, men and women, before someone broke her neck. Myles—just Myles, don't call him "Agent Myles"—has a smorgasbord of possible suspects to interview, most of them hiding something. As he learns more and more about Allegra's frequently brief sexual adventures and why some people might have it in for her, he slowly uncovers a conspiracy involving synthetic neurotoxins (they have the properties of cobra snake venom) and "adeno-associated viruses." Allegra seems to have discovered something she wasn't supposed to, but what? A stand-alone from the author of Thick as Thieves (2011) and the John March series, the novel is an admirable attempt at melding Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, with hints of Nordic noir. But Myles, who narrates, is pretty much a blank slate, a clinical sort with a touch of sarcasm to lighten things but no personal history to speak of aside from the death two years ago of his girlfriend. He has an odd (some might say creepy) fixation on women's looks and smells, picking up "notes of pear and freesia" from one woman's perfume, admiring another woman's teeth that were "bright and even in a generous mouth," and taking notice of a woman's "tight chestnut curls...thick, springy, and anarchic." And there is nothing to suggest any physical presence on his part, so when he suddenly makes like Jack Reacher in a fight scene, you wonder where that came from.
A smart, atmospheric novel with a hole at its core.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-307-96129-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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