A topical but sometimes stodgy thriller about the hunt for a human trafficker.
A survivor of human trafficking tries to escape her old life.
At the heart of this novel by Epps is a young woman named Ava Rose Anderson who spent years in the clutches of charismatic figure and nefarious human trafficker Jeffrey Hoffman, the book’s Jeffrey Epstein–like villain. “Hoffman had held her captive for just over four years until she escaped that life at eighteen,” the narrative reads. “In the first few years of her escape, she’d had as much therapy as she could tolerate.” But the anxieties and dark thoughts of her time sealed in Hoffman’s “coterie of crass” still haunt her as the story opens, years later, when she’s living comfortably in Florida with her boyfriend, Caleb, in a quiet life that seems every bit as wholesome as her previous life was sordid. At one point, Ava’s friend Piper, who’d also been trafficked by Hoffman, joins Ava in reflecting on the life they’re both hoping they’ve left behind. “You just do it ‘cause it starts off fun and exciting,” she reflects. “And everyone is rich and offering you nice things and amazing places to go, and all you have to do for it is, is that.” Epps’ narrative shifts back and forth in time, at some points ranging to years past in order to show Hoffman at the peak of his power (and Ava in the depths of her misery) and, at other points, ranging to the present, when Hoffman is disgraced and dead but his former top lieutenant Maxime Bredwell is alive, at large, and generally unrepentant (“No one would have dreamed that she loved a good grift,” readers are told. “She’d laugh to herself in bored moments at how utterly naive people could be”). When Ava decides to find the elusive Maxine and confront her, the narrative takes off.
Epps writes this story as a fictionalized version of what might have happened if one of the young human trafficking victims of Jeffrey Epstein and his assistant, Ghislaine Maxwell, had been able to take matters into her own hands. The novel effectively depicts the world of Jeffrey Hoffman as well as the psychology of someone like Maxime Bredwell, who’s under close surveillance by an experienced retiree from the military. The decision to continually toggle the novel’s chronology to tell Ava’s and Hoffman’s overlapping stories is a risky one, and some of the dangers are obvious here. The shifts often feel more distracting than dramatically effective. Another gripe is the failure of Ava to ignite as a dramatic creation. Even when she’s upending her settled life and beginning to take major chances in her quest to right some wrongs, she seems fairly flat on the page. “Self-pity threatened to overwhelm her project,” readers are told in a typical characterization of Ava’s mental state. “Untethered and so completely unsettled, she doubted.” Epps has his eye on a larger revenge plot, but the novel’s action builds too slowly.
A topical but sometimes stodgy thriller about the hunt for a human trafficker.Pub Date: April 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-57-889737-0
Page Count: 231
Publisher: Mess Hall Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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
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