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
Nail-biting and pressure-packed.
Jack Ryan Jr. and company race to stop a killer wave in this Tom Clancy thriller.
The ship Meridian Star departs eastern Russia unknowingly carrying a pair of containers with radioactive cesium chloride. The vessel is hijacked and scuttled in Micronesia near the Mariana Trench, and the crew is murdered. A huge insurance claim results, and Jack, an accomplished deep-sea diver who works for Hendley Associates, is there to investigate. The hostile Chinese learn it’s there and want that illicit cargo. Meanwhile, the Naval Undersea Warfare Center discovers a huge, mysterious object in 600 feet of water. At that depth, the pressure is unsurvivable without complex special equipment, which is vintage Tom Clancy. Whatever the strange object is, it’s “not a ship…not a submarine…not an aircraft.” On the side is a faded hammer and sickle and Cyrillic letters that spell Siren. Ryan teams up with Navy divers, and they look for a way to safely enter and explore the object. They discover that the underwater contraption has thermonuclear warheads attached, left and long forgotten by the USSR. If the warheads explode, they could still achieve their apparent purpose—to trigger a tsunami and destroy Guam, which is strategically important to the U.S. The Chinese know it too, and the race is on to take control. The result is plenty of high-stakes undersea action, where death can come from a bullet, a knife, or a sliced air hose. But there’s action on land, too. Navy master diver Carla Bennett and Jack take on a surprise assault in a hotel where Carla shows off stellar fighting skills—better than Jack’s. These two aren’t the only heroes here, as there’s a well-balanced cast of characters, all brave and likable. And of course—of course—where there’s a bomb, there’s a ticking clock.
Nail-biting and pressure-packed.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9798217183166
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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