More curious than spooky, but featuring a riveting protagonist haunted by his own guilt.
A tormented father must decide whether he’s seeing the ghost of his dead son or visions brought on by psychosis in this thriller.
It’s been six months since his 5-year-son, Alex, died, and Ian Colmes is, suffice to say, not coping well. Estranged from his wife and Alex’s mom, Alina, Ian is frequently late for his tech-support job. He’s rife with self-reproach, because he wasn’t able to protect his son from Leroy Eston, who allegedly kidnapped Alex. Cops found Eston dead from a gunshot wound, theorizing that his gun went off during a struggle with the boy, and he killed Alex before bleeding out himself. When Ian first hears sounds of his departed child playing, he attributes it to an overactive imagination but fears it could indicate schizophrenia. His son subsequently materializes and talks to Ian, often repeatedly saying things like he can’t find one of his stuffed animals. As Alex gets harder to ignore, even screaming for his father when Ian keeps the boy’s bedroom door shut, Ian debates whether he’s going crazy or experiencing ghostly encounters. When his visions start including Eston (or Eston’s apparition), Ian witnesses what seem to be scenes from Alex’s time in captivity. He’s sure Alex is trying to tell him something, namely that there’s more to the abduction than Ian knows. The novel gets a big dose of mystery, with phantoms a mere possibility for the bulk of the story. It’s never outright terrifying but certainly unsettling, especially once Eston makes appearances. Nevertheless, it wholeheartedly succeeds as a tale examining a distressed father. Ian, for example, grapples with the possibility of boss Justin Keplin firing him and hopes to make amends with Alina by, for starters, attending group counseling sessions. The narrative, too, from Ian’s perspective, is generally depressing, with a pajama-clad Alex asking Ian for a hug but vanishing before his father can embrace him. Nicolai (Todd, 2015, etc.) amps up the suspense in the final act, when a proactive Ian delves into Eston’s life. There’s a twist or two, as well as a gratifying wrap-up that leaves just a bit open for interpretation.
More curious than spooky, but featuring a riveting protagonist haunted by his own guilt.Pub Date: Dec. 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4680-9735-1
Page Count: 300
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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