Cash (A Land More Kind Than Home, 2012) follows his evocative debut with another striking take on Southern literature.
Wade Chesterfield’s a failed baseball player. He claims to have been Sammy Sosa’s teammate on the Gastonia Rangers, a North Carolina minor league team. Now, Wade hangs drywall. Brady Weller used to be a Gastonia police detective, until he killed a teenage boy in a traffic accident. Now, Brady sells home security systems, offering silent penance by serving as a court guardian ad litem. That’s how Brady meets Easter and Ruby Quillby, wards of the state. They’re Wade’s children, their mother dead of an overdose. Wade, parental rights signed long ago, now wants to be a true father. Wade’s enabled by found money: a backpack of cash linked to an armored car robbery. In the rhythms and cadence of the South, Cash offers a tale about family and about the tenuous link among the right choices, living with consequences or seeking redemption. The story unfolds in three voices: 12-year-old Easter, echoing from naïve to wise, hopeful to fearful, believing and doubting; Brady, weary, bitter, intent on finding justice where he can; and finally, Robert Pruitt, former baseball player, now an ex-con driven by 'roid-rage and mindless hatred for Wade, who long ago hit him with a beanball and maimed him. Wade persuades his daughters to flee their foster home. In dread of being sent to Alaska to grandparents she’s never met, Easter agrees, since "leaving with him seemed like the best answer." Despite admonitions from his former partner and threats from the FBI, Brady's intent on finding the girls. Then he learns Pruitt’s being paid by Tommy Broughton, a small-time hood who engineered the armored car heist, to find Wade and the stolen money, and Brady’s pursuit grows more urgent, realizing Pruitt will kill the girls to get to Wade. A story of family, blood loyalty and making choices that can seem right but end up wrong.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-208825-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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