A gritty, violent read with a tough, idiosyncratic, dryly witty heroine readers will root for even if they wouldn’t want to...
A Vancouver woman with demons to spare is asked to find a teen runaway in Kamal’s searing debut.
When Nora Watts receives a 5 a.m. phone call from a man named Everett Walsh insisting that she might know something about a missing girl, his desperation is palpable. Nora, who "help[s] look for missing people for a living," reluctantly meets with Everett and his wife, Lynn, and finds out that their 15-year-old daughter, Bonnie, is missing, but because she’s run away before, the police won’t take it seriously. Nora is their last resort, they tell her, because she's Bonnie's biological mother—she'd given the girl up for adoption 15 years earlier. At first, Nora doesn’t want anything to do with the case, but something pulls at her, and as she digs deeper, it threatens to pull her all the way under. Nora narrates her own story, and she doesn’t care if you like her. In fact, she keeps everyone at arm’s length, taking comfort only in her beloved dog, Whisper, stealing from those who show her kindness, and refusing help from the private investigator and journalist who employ her. Estranged from her younger sister and a former child of the foster care system, she used to seek solace in the bottle, and it always threatens right at the edge of her vision. Nora’s Vancouver in winter is one of endless natural beauty, but dark currents run beneath it that highlight the harsh treatment of indigenous people, especially girls and women, and the ease with which they are swept away and forgotten. It’s a bracing reality that underscores Nora’s painful, violent past, and debut novelist Kamal uses her own background in community activism to great effect. As Nora searches for Bonnie, the trail of corruption leads her to a wealthy family with ties to mining, but what would they have to do with a missing girl? The truth is beyond terrifying, and if readers think they know where this is going, they’ll likely be surprised. The brutal finale tests Nora to her very limits. Though comparisons to Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander are inevitable, Nora blazes her own shining trail.
A gritty, violent read with a tough, idiosyncratic, dryly witty heroine readers will root for even if they wouldn’t want to invite her home.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-256590-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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