Feverishly frothy tale of an actress living incognito, menaced by a shadowy stalker. It’s been five years since Mallory Eden, that “perky, pretty, girl-next-door” starlet everybody loved, supposedly jumped off a Montana cliff into the turbulent Rock River. Her body was never found, but a suicide note in her Lexus implies that she was unhinged by an unidentified stalker who not only sent her threatening letters, but killed her secretary and then shot Eden in the womb so she could never conceive. While the Hollywood infotainment world mourns, a somewhat fleshier Eden is silently fighting baby cravings and nightmares in the unremarkable Rhode Island hamlet of Windemere Cove. Pretending to be freelance writer Elizabeth Baxter (who never seems to read or write), Eden, whose pre-Hollywood name was Cindy O’Neal, gets an ominous, anonymous letter in the mail one day from someone who purports to know who she is. Baxter-Eden-O’Neal thinks she faked her suicide perfectly, but her past, revealed through distractingly shrill flashbacks, has enough unresolved conflicts (her sleazy boyfriend has become a coveted guest on daytime talk shows), family trauma (she was abandoned as a child by her drug-addicted mother), and trashy secrets (she made her debut in a porno flick) to fill a Jacqueline Susann novel. While our heroine tries to guess who the stalker is (the kindly but strangely familiar locksmith, or her nosey policeman neighbor?), a host of skeletons, including her long-lost mother, stumble out of the closet to claim her for vile and shameless purposes. Shiny with Tinseltown sleaze, this first solo hardcover from Staub plays its tabloid terrors and tacky soap opera clichÇs deathlessly straight. The result is funny when it shouldn’t be, silly and affected the rest of the time. A hissy catfight during the cliff-hanging finale is a hoot, but not worth the campy climb to get there.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-57566-285-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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