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 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
It’s just as exhausting as it sounds, but it may be the most ambitious spy novel you’ve ever read.
What happens when an eminent mystery novelist collaborates with an award-winning journalist on a spy thriller? Pretty much everything you can imagine.
While food blogger Alice Li is in retreat from her overbearing mother, famous Chinese dissident Vivien Li, in a restaurant bathroom, the alarm goes off. And not just the fire alarm, but every alarm in the city, the country, and around the world. Their triggering is clearly an act of terrorism, and the silencing of all those alarms, which comes as suddenly and inexplicably as their screeching, is anything but reassuring. Vivien spirits her daughter off to the White House, where Grant McAllister, the director of National Intelligence, informs Alice that her friend and fellow blogger Liam Palmer has just been fished from the Hong Kong harbor. McAllister and Alan Zhou, head of the China Mission Center, are convinced Liam knew something about those alarms, and President Fraser Pardington is determined to do whatever he can to prevent a sequel. He fails, of course, and the second act of global terrorism is even more disastrous than the first. All the president’s men and women initially believe the threat comes from the Chinese government, and Chinese President Chen Jiayang thinks the Americans might be behind it. Alice and Vivien race around the globe to track down the culprit, and what they find will knit together the fates of Alice’s family, the U.S. and China, and the history of the world as we know it.
It’s just as exhausting as it sounds, but it may be the most ambitious spy novel you’ve ever read.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9781250412522
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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