by Rebecca Fleet ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 22, 2018
While this mediocre thriller may provide a fix for some die-hard fans of domestic noir, most readers will be disappointed.
Marital infidelity, drug addiction, house swapping, stalking, and a surprise ending add up to a psychologically suspenseful story in British novelist Fleet's U.S. debut.
When Caroline and Francis set out from their home in Leeds, they're already struggling to repair their troubled 15-year marriage. Their destination is a house in Chiswick, a London suburb, where they're doing a one-week house swap. As they settle into the sparsely furnished loaner house, Caroline finds pink roses and other things that remind her of a passionate extramarital affair she had two years earlier with Carl, a co-worker eight years her junior. Caroline soon suspects that her house-swap partner, S. Kennedy, is actually Carl and that her peculiar and intrusive Chiswick neighbor Amber may be a co-conspirator. Two timelines, stretching from 2012 to 2015, intersect to reveal why Carl ended the affair with Caroline, who S. Kennedy really is, and why S. Kennedy has gone to such extreme lengths to torment Caroline with reminders of Carl. The premise stretches believability, and why Caroline doesn't flee the Chiswick house is never adequately explained. Nor is it clear why she remains married to a man she dislikes or why he sticks it out with her when he knows she's guilty of more than infidelity. The unmasking of S. Kennedy spins the plot off on a tangent, multiple coincidences and contrivances undercut the story's credibility, and the denouement is unsatisfying as Caroline gets handed easy ways out of her problems. The story has some creepy and subtle moments, but their effect is diluted by an uneven pace, one-dimensional characters (all of whom are unhappy), and a gratuitous threat to Caroline and Francis' 4-year-old son.
While this mediocre thriller may provide a fix for some die-hard fans of domestic noir, most readers will be disappointed.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-55883-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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by Karin Slaughter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 29, 2015
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
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Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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