Just the kind of dark, disturbing, gritty, and unusual treat thriller lovers are looking for.
When children begin to go missing in a small New Zealand town, the file clerk at the police station turns investigator.
Set in the provincial town of Masterton, Baragwanath's debut is both social novel and thriller, spinning the tensions between the white and Māori populations, the chokehold of street gangs, and the toll of drug addiction on young families into a suspenseful crime drama. As the novel opens, a child named Precious Kīngi has been missing for three weeks, and Lorraine Henry, a policeman's widow who works in the file room at the station, is concerned that almost nothing is being done to find her or to protect the town’s other children. Lorraine's life revolves around her job, drinking gin with her neighbor Patty (people wrongly suspect that they’re lovers), and helping out her adult, part-Māori niece, Sheena, whom she raised after her sister and brother-in-law were killed when returning from a seasonal job shearing sheep. Now Sheena has a 7-year-old son named Bradley, and on a night so rainy there are eels in the gutters, Lorraine heads over to their house. She's greeted at the door by Bradley's mostly absentee father, Keith, a drug dealer and gang member, and she immediately smells "the musty waft" and scorched lightbulbs of cooking drugs. Sheena shrugs off Lorraine's worries but they're well-founded. Sheena is on drugs, Keith is staying with her, and in the next few days, two more children will disappear. And one of them is Bradley. When an out-of-town investigator arrives to ramp up the search, he quickly recognizes Lorraine as the most likely person to offer any help. Resist the urge to race to the climax and keep Google close at hand to look up Māori words, because fully understanding the relationship between Masterton's white and Indigenous cultures is central—not just to appreciating the book but to solving the mystery.
Just the kind of dark, disturbing, gritty, and unusual treat thriller lovers are looking for.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780593685105
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett has been shot plenty of times before. But this time may be the last.
As Joe hovers between life and death in a Billings hospital, Box indicates that Dorn Peddy and James Dale O’Bryan are the two men who ambushed him, shot him, and left him for dead. But he doesn’t reveal who hired them or why. That’s left up to Joe’s three daughters: bird-abatement firm chief executive Sheridan, Bozeman private eye April, and University of Wyoming undergrad Lucy. Since the man who reported the incident to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department has disappeared, the most that newly appointed Sheriff Steve Sondergard can do is to warn Sheridan and her sisters away from the case. But the fact that both the shooters and the witness seem to have come from one of exactly three places presents an obvious appeal to the younger Picketts, who plan to each visit one place and question the owners simultaneously before they can warn each other that anyone’s coming. The only problem is that all the possible suspects—billionaire Michael Thompson and his wife, Brandy, of the Double Diamond Ranch; ranchers John and Shelby Bucholz, of the Bucholz Cattle Company; and secretive sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee, of McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch—act equally guilty. As Box unspools a series of flashbacks showing what Joe was up to in the weeks before the ambush, one question assumes paramount importance: Can Joe’s daughters identify which of them is behind the plot to murder their father before the hired gunmen visit the hospital and try again?
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593851098
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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