Oodles of atmosphere largely make up for a bit of predictability in this gothic chiller.
A woman seeking solitude finds much more than she bargained for—maybe even a ghost or two—on a windswept Scottish island.
Connecticut artist Zoe Adams, fleeing a failing marriage, has rented the remote, recently renovated 19th-century McBride mansion in Scotland for a month. She’s eager to settle in and paint the beautiful landscape just outside her door. Landlords Mick and Kaye are welcoming, but at the pub they also own, elderly local bookseller Charles—who's a bit obsessed with McBride lore—tells her that the house has quite a history, one that Mick would prefer was kept on the down low. Her first night is a doozy: After falling into an exhausted sleep, she dreams of a shadow lover that brings her to new heights of passion and glimpses a dark figure on the beach looking up at the house. Then there’s the persistent singing—a haunting, achingly sad rendition of a song Kaye sang at the bar. Most people would have been out the door and back on a plane home forthwith, but not our intrepid heroine. Zoe blames the strange happenings on fatigue and digs her heels in. Of course, the odd occurrences escalate (do they ever), and she learns from Charles that the McBride history is very strange indeed: It turns out that the man who built the house and his bride, Ailsa, were into the occult, and the circumstances surrounding her death and that of her little boy were suspect. As the danger escalates, it becomes difficult for Zoe to tell the difference between dreams and reality. And, of course, there’s a storm coming. Merritt, who also writes as S.J. Parris (Conspiracy, 2016, etc.), fully immerses readers in her richly imagined setting and hints that there’s much more to the events leading up to Zoe’s trip. The author’s strenuous attempt to counter the unfortunate trope of the hysterical woman is laudable, and Zoe comes to relate to the misunderstood Ailsa. Zoe's flirtation with a much younger schoolteacher named Edward is refreshing, realistic, and very sexy. Merritt certainly knows how to build suspense and dread even if readers of the genre will find a few of the elements familiar.
Oodles of atmosphere largely make up for a bit of predictability in this gothic chiller.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-005-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
