A thriller that doesn’t elevate its fascinating core premise.
Across two timelines, a band of friends explores the secrets of an Arkansas hot springs town.
In a town in the Ozarks, there are eight magic houses, each with its own abilities. One house forces visitors to tell the truth, another can slow down time for those inside it, and a third grants powerful luck. The friends spend their senior year of high school hunting for the houses; the eighth and most mysterious they call the Portal House, and they believe it can transport them to the alternate dimension that gives the houses their powers. But their quest ends in tragedy, and most of the group leaves town, presumably for good. Fifteen years later, in 2015, they’re drawn back when one of them—Brandi—disappears. While the rest of the friends found success elsewhere, Brandi stayed in Arkansas, cleaning houses and struggling with an addiction to prescription pills. The book focuses on Jay, a painter constricted by guilt over leaving Brandi, her one-time best friend, behind. There’s also Iggy, a popular quarterback who was once Jay’s lover; Charlie, bookish and wistful; and Max and Hilma, wealthy twins who are outsiders to the town. Finding Brandi is mandatory: The group is bound by an oath they took, given power by one of the houses. The influences of Stephen King, Donna Tartt, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are clear here. Aside from the fantastical houses, which are neither haunted nor quite benevolent, the world of the novel is conventional, and Jay is the only character with depth. At the end, the person who turns out to be the antagonist discusses their actions and motives and then asks: “Is this like at the end of some cheesy movie, where the villain just explains everything to you?” Jay isn’t sure if it’s just a joke, and neither is the reader.
A thriller that doesn’t elevate its fascinating core premise.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780374601775
Page Count: 384
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Expert, but unsurprising.
The death of an old friend who was more than a friend sends Dr. Kay Scarpetta down her latest rabbit hole.
If every body tells a story, the corpse of 7-year-old Luna Briley sings the blues. On top of the many signs of ongoing physical abuse, there’s the fatal gunshot wound to her head. Ryder and Piper Briley, the wealthy and powerful parents who didn’t call the police until after their daughter died, insist that Luna’s death was an accident, or maybe a suicide. Scarpetta doesn’t think so, and her refusal to release the body to the Brileys’ hand-picked mortician moves them to legal action against her as Virginia’s chief medical examiner. You’d think it would be a relief to put this case aside for another when Scarpetta’s niece, Secret Service agent Lucy Farinelli, calls her and ferries her by helicopter to an abandoned Oz theme park owned by Ryder Briley, but this one’s even more heartbreaking. Scarpetta is there to examine the body of astrophysicist Sal Giordano, her close friend and former lover, who was evidently kidnapped, held in captivity for several hours, and tossed out of an unidentified aircraft. The leading suspects are the Brileys; Carrie Grethen, Lucy’s sociopathic ex-lover, with whom Scarpetta has repeatedly tangled in the past; and the UFO that dumped Giordano’s body without leaving the usual traces for air-traffic technologies to pick up. The multiple rounds of physical examinations Scarpetta conducts on both victims are every bit as meticulous and gripping as fans would expect; the killer’s identity is neither surprising nor interesting, but Cornwell juggles her trademark forensics, and the paranormal hints she’s become increasingly invested in, more dexterously than usual.
Expert, but unsurprising.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781538770382
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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