An unremittingly bleak, engrossing, and ferocious tale of an inevitable and potentially dangerous future.
A Vietnam veteran and an enigmatic woman hurtle toward an uncertain destiny in this dark, supernatural thriller.
Tennessee-born Amboy Stevens has made a life as a miner in Argentina. On an autumn day in 1982, he agrees to pay off a debt by helping fellow American Lettie Fennick. Lettie is a redheaded Black woman with partial amnesia and, just like Amboy, six fingers on each hand. While the Vietnam vet finds and brings Lettie to relative safety, myriad groups are apparently after her, from the CIA to a Nazi cult. Amboy is mostly in the dark; he doesn’t know what exactly the figures are chasing or if their intentions are noble or sinister. But he fights to protect Lettie as the two gradually fall for each other. They dodge gunfire, vicious torturers, and horrid, baleful creatures that appear to be made of sticks. Amboy and Lettie, desperate for answers, rush to a place where they hope to unearth the things she can’t remember. But what awaits the pair is not something Amboy likely anticipated. Ochse shrouds this novel in mystery. Notwithstanding Amboy’s distaste for “cryptic conversations,” he rarely has any other kind, as characters’ agendas are either vague or unknown. A rich atmosphere nevertheless permeates the story; everywhere Amboy and Lettie go seems treacherous and rife with untrustworthy people—dangers that some try to warn the vet about. The couple’s growing romance is convincing, while the engaging tale intermittently dives into Amboy’s past, some of which has curious ties to the present day. Short bursts of action, such as Amboy speeding down the road on a commandeered motorcycle, keep the story moving at a steady clip. And readers finally get some answers in the searing climax as Amboy and Lettie face their shocking fates.
An unremittingly bleak, engrossing, and ferocious tale of an inevitable and potentially dangerous future.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Aethon Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.
Following the mysterious disappearance of his wife, a struggling London novelist journeys to a remote Scottish island to try to get his mojo back—but all, of course, is not what it seems.
Grady Green hits the pinnacle of his publishing career on the same night that his life goes off the rails—first his book lands on the New York Times bestseller list, and then his wife, Abby, goes missing on her way home. A year later, Grady is a mere shadow of his former self: out of money and out of ideas. So, when his agent, Abby’s godmother, suggests that he spend some time on the Isle of Amberly, in a log cabin left to her by one of her writers, it seems as good a plan as any. With free housing for himself and his dog and a beautiful, distraction-free environment, maybe he can finally complete the next novel. But from the very beginning, Grady’s experiences with Amberly seem weird, if not downright ominous: As a visitor, he’s not allowed to bring his car onto the island; the local businesses are only open for a few hours at a time; and there are no birds. At all. Not to mention the skeletal hand he finds buried under the floorboards of the cabin, the creepy harmonica music in the woods, and the occasional sighting of a woman in a red coat who’s a dead ringer for Abby. As Grady falls deeper and deeper into insomnia and alcoholism, he begins to realize his being on the island is no accident—and that should make him very afraid. Through occasional chapters from before Abby’s disappearance, told from her point of view, we learn that Grady is not necessarily a reliable narrator, and the book’s slow unfolding of dread, mystery, and then truth is both creative and well-paced. Every chapter heading is an oxymoron, like the title, reminding us of the contradictions at the heart of every story.
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781250337788
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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