An enthralling story, darkly thoughtful and convincing.
An American salesman vacationing in France is mistaken for someone else and accused of murder in Chaney’s thriller.
Richard Slade is a 43-year-old pesticide salesman from St. Louis, Missouri—or, as he memorably and melodramatically puts it, a “merchant of death.” In fact, his life is painfully drudging. He wrestles with the torpor of his “existential quandary,” even taking up poetry as a bulwark against his life’s banality. When Slade decides to take a short vacation to Nice to see an old friend named Septimus Morgan, he ends up with far more excitement than he bargained for in this taut drama. A mysterious woman accosts him at a bar, pointing a gun at him and forcing a flash drive into his coat pocket. Later, he is arrested by French police for her murder, and while being transported by them somewhere, the officers are shot by three masked gunmen who clearly mean to kill Richard as well. He manages to escape, only to find himself on the run from both French authorities and criminals about whom he knows nothing. The author magisterially exercises literary restraint—the reader is told enough to avoid exasperating bewilderment but is, like Richard, kept in a state of suspenseful confusion. Chaney’s prose is artfully terse and punchy—here, Richard struggles to come to grips with his painful predicament: “The only fitting end to the tale would be if I suddenly woke up in a psychiatric ward, shackled to a bed. That would have been the best of all possible worlds. To know that I had gone mad and the rest of the world was still reliably sane.” The plot is more than a touch convoluted, ultimately folding in the CIA, British intelligence, and terrorists looking to manufacture weapons-grade mustard gas. Somehow, though, it all feels plausible enough, and the author resists the urge to transform his protagonist into some sort of badass soldier-of-fortune. This is an engrossing tale, exciting and terrifying. Even as it becomes excessively labyrinthine, the work remains impressively intelligent.
An enthralling story, darkly thoughtful and convincing.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781737540632
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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