by Diana Gould ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 15, 2013
Celebrity, addiction, money and deception collide in this exciting debut mystery.
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Derailed by addiction, a writer gets the chance to redeem herself in this suspenseful Hollywood thriller.
Brett Tanager had it all. A reporter who became a successful television showrunner with her very first idea, Brett lived with her gorgeous boyfriend and had a wonderful relationship with his daughter, Julia. Brett had just one problem: She couldn’t write without alcohol and drugs. Late one night, after a trip to her dealer, she killed a woman in a hit-and-run. Gould’s debut novel really begins years after Brett’s accident. Having lost everything, she’s now house-sitting in present-day Malibu. She’s standing at the water’s edge, contemplating suicide, when Julia appears. Brett resists the urge to drink while Julia describes how her best friend, Caleigh, the daughter of the Hollywood big shot who produced Brett’s show, has disappeared. Despite her immense wealth, Caleigh was involved in “enjo kosai,” a Japanese variant of prostitution in which older men pay teenage girls large amounts of money for sex. Julia is convinced that, since the show Brett wrote was a police procedural, Brett will be able to find Caleigh. Brett knows she’s not capable of finding anything other than the bottom of a bottle of Glenfiddich, but she goes to find a private investigator’s phone number for Julia. When Brett returns, Julia has vanished. Her disappearance prompts Brett to re-engage with her old Hollywood life—and even start to get clean—to save Julia. But will Brett’s efforts to pull her life together be too little, too late? And will she ever confess to her own crime? A television writer herself, Gould clearly knows Brett’s milieu. Most characters seem plucked from US Weekly: Brad and Angelina copycats Campbell McCauley and Rosalie Bennett; “Internet gossip maven” Jason Ratt; and Nic Ripetti, “go-to investigator for the stars.” The locations are similarly realistic, whether Brett is enduring an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting a few blocks from the beach or making her way through a Hollywood funeral-turned–networking session. Occasionally, an inauthentic or clichéd phrase slows the novel’s forward momentum, as when Brett observes that a doctor’s “brown eyes glinted like jewels offset by clear white,” or when Brett’s desire rises “like embers catching fire.” But those clunky moments are only minor road bumps in Brett’s frenetic, entertaining ride.
Celebrity, addiction, money and deception collide in this exciting debut mystery.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0988931244
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Gibraltar Road
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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