An action-packed murder mystery, buoyantly written and suspenseful.
Two detectives investigate a family’s mysterious murder and encounter a network of sex and conspiracy.
Detectives Mitchell and Sandovan are given a tip from a petty criminal so implausible it rings true: During the burglary of a posh home, he discovered a family of four dead at the dinner table. The detectives find the Harbmans just as described—the parents, their son, and his girlfriend—seated in funerary stillness, presiding grimly over a partially eaten roast beef, a scene chillingly depicted by author Williams (Shank, 2017, etc.). Angela, the 20-year-old daughter of the Harbman family, is missing and is later found hiding in a panic room within the house, nearly dead. A toxicology report reveals that the family was poisoned with Carfentanil, an opioid that dwarfs heroin in potency. The Harbmans initially seem like an innocuous clan, but as the detectives dig deeper, they find a long list of suspects, a colorful spectrum of humanity intelligently depicted by the author. First, their insufferably aristocratic neighbors openly detested them for class jumping; the Harbmans became uber-rich by winning a lottery. Neighbor Mr. Kovich claims Angela nearly ruined his son by seducing him. And the Harbmans’ housekeeper, Ms. Lindstrom, once served prison time for poisoning a prior employer. But a cloud of suspicion hangs over Angela as well. Her sexual appetite is purported to be “insatiable” and nearly indiscriminate. To make matters more complicated (and increasingly dubious), someone who is clearly trying to obstruct the investigation plots against Mitchell’s girlfriend, Mya, attempting to destroy her career. Williams vividly constructs a morally confounding world in which good and evil are messily intermixed: “The unpredictability of humanity puzzled Mitchell. He saw more shades of it than most. People were capable of exceptional generosity but also exceptional cruelty. Sometimes they were interwoven in the same strands of DNA.” The writing is acidly sharp and often laced with wit, though the author isn’t above indulging in detective-talk clichés: “He’s going away for a long stretch.” The plot strains the reader’s credulity for the sake of gratuitous complexity, but the characters are so deftly drawn, and the drama so lucidly described, it simply doesn’t matter.
An action-packed murder mystery, buoyantly written and suspenseful.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 347
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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