A gripping suspense novel set on the remote compound of a bizarre religious community.
A woman in a claustrophobic desert cult searches for a missing runaway in Paine’s debut thriller.
Raine Harkins lives by the Teaching, the religious doctrine that governs the Haven, a small religious community based in remote northern Nevada. She’s still a contented believer, though now that she’s nearly 30, she wishes she had someone to share her life with. “Everyone I grew up with has married or left the Haven,” she narrates, “but I know God will send my soul mate to me. Yet, it’s hard. The men in town don’t understand our way of life, and we’re down to less than ten families in the Haven.” Until then, she just has Java, but her free-spirited dog is prone to taking off into the wilderness. While searching for Java during one such occasion, Raine discovers a teenage girl hiding in the sagebrush. Samantha is a recent addition to the Haven and the newly adopted daughter of Raine’s friends Monica, the daughter of the community’s pastor, and David Johansen, the man Raine wishes she could have married. Samantha bolts, Raine loses sight of her, and gunshots sound among the trees. When Raine returns home that night, she finds a note left on her door in unfamiliar handwriting: “God is watching you. Sooner or later, he’s going to run you down.” Samantha is missing. Another twist: Noah Carlson, the new student of religion who has come to study the Haven, is, unbeknown to its members, actually a private detective sent by Samantha’s birth family to bring her home. As pressures mount from both outside and inside the community, Raine feels compelled to help find the girl. But the threatening messages keep appearing, and the answers she finds force her to begin questioning the Teaching for the first time in her life.
The novel cycles through Raine’s, David’s, and Noah’s perspectives as each attempts to navigate a fraught situation. The prose is urgent and sharp, as here where Noah realizes his job has gotten even trickier: “The news Samantha ran away from the Haven, though, has thrown a wrench in things. He can’t convince her to come back to Las Vegas if she’s gone. He’s not sure what to tell her father. The runaway has run away, and someone was shooting a gun in the woods.” Paine has chosen some wonderfully creepy elements—the desert landscape and the cult’s practices of channeling their guiding spirit, Sebastian, and plastering their Shrine with hundreds of letters to God—but he also treats his characters as complex human personalities. From this emotional mix, the tension builds slowly until it becomes nearly panic inducing. The pages fly by, pulling the reader deeper into the mysterious workings of the Haven. Paine is a talented storyteller and brings the novel to a satisfying conclusion. Readers will look forward to whatever chilling tale he comes up with next.
A gripping suspense novel set on the remote compound of a bizarre religious community.Pub Date: March 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-0999218334
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Dark Swallow Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A particularly nasty villain heightens the stakes in this thriller about a woman learning how to be her own hero.
An author is targeted by a fan who just can’t let her go.
Arden Bowie has had plenty of tragedy in her life, but now she’s finally on top. After her parents died when she was a teenager, she moved from Brooklyn to Ohio to live with her aunt, uncle, and cousins. She soon became part of their loving family and grew up to become a writer and bookseller. When her debut novel is published, she meets Dustin Dubecki at her first event. He showers her with praise, asks for writing advice, and wants to take her out for coffee. Arden tells herself he’s just a little awkward, but then he keeps showing up at her local events—and, even stranger, she’s sure she sees him lurking at her event in New York City. When he bursts into her apartment one night and assaults her, Arden’s calm life is shattered. Dustin gets a five-year sentence at a psychiatric facility; Arden spends most of that time rebuilding her sense of stability. Eventually, she moves to Oregon to start a new life where Dustin can never find her. But even though she has a beautiful home, a thriving career, a doting family, new friends, and even a potential love interest in a former cop named Gideon Riley, Arden can’t escape Dustin’s rage when his sentence is finally up. Roberts toggles between Arden’s point of view and Dustin’s, giving the reader occasional glimpses into his extremely twisted mindset. Although Arden’s attempts to escape Dustin are engrossing, the story stalls in the middle when far too many pages are dedicated to Arden purchasing and decorating a house. But the excitement picks back up when Dustin, a truly odious villain, re-enters the story. It’s also satisfying to see Arden grow into someone who refuses to be a victim, even as she deals with horrifying circumstances.
A particularly nasty villain heightens the stakes in this thriller about a woman learning how to be her own hero.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781250413581
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
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
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