Readers will gladly lose themselves in this novel’s sense of foreboding.
An obsessed detective seeks revenge upon three men for his brother’s drowning death in Cioffari’s (Dark Road, Dead End, 2016, etc.) thriller.
Danny Baker, Charlie Romano, Johnny Whalen, and Tim Mooney once called themselves “the Renegades.” Five years ago, they all tried to swim across a channel called the Bronx Kill, along with Julianne Regan, whose attention Danny and Charlie were vying for. But the current was too strong, and only three people stepped out of the water; police fished out Tim’s body the following day, but never found Julianne’s. Still, the remaining trio’s reunion in the present-day Bronx should have been a happy one; Johnny, who left the seminary, is marrying his longtime girlfriend, Lorraine. Unfortunately, Tim’s detective brother, Tommy Mooney, is making them all anxious, as he relentlessly questions them about the fateful night years before. Tommy is positive that at least one Renegade is somehow responsible for his brother’s demise, and he further proposes that Julianne’s body wasn’t recovered because she made it across the channel alive. One thing is unmistakable: Tommy wants to mete out some kind of punishment. But after Charlie is attacked in what initially seems to be a gang initiation, he, Danny, and Johnny guess that Tommy was actually behind it. Eventually, they must all confront a bleak memory. Cioffari incorporates a sturdy mystery into his story—what exactly transpired at the Kill isn’t revealed at the outset—but it’s the brooding atmosphere that truly packs a punch. The author fills the pages with recurring images that act as reminders of impending menace: Tommy’s Mercury Marquis (ominously identified as “the black Merc”); the aforementioned Kill; and Charlie’s bar, the MoonGlow, which alludes to the Mooneys and particularly Tim’s nickname, “the Moon.” There are countless unnerving moments, such as when Johnny swears that he’s seen his dead friend in the flesh, or when Tommy claims that he has a witness to the alleged crime. Still, Cioffari allows ample room to flesh out his characters, particularly Danny, who shares a few sublime, emotional scenes with his widower father.
Readers will gladly lose themselves in this novel’s sense of foreboding.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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