Gardiner has mastered the art of the serial-killer saga without an ounce of fat.
Los Angeles may not have snow at Christmastime, but it’s got the next best thing: a stone-cold serial killer who provides FBI behavioral analyst Caitlin Hendrix (Into the Black Nowhere, 2018, etc.) with her third, and perhaps most chilling, adversary.
What kind of person breaks into houses when the whole family is home, executes both parents, but leaves the children alive to live with their nightmares? Only someone, as Caitlin tells her boss, CJ Emmerich, who has “deliberately created surviving witnesses.” The Midnight Man, as he’s soon dubbed, dispatches four married couples, leaving behind such memorabilia as scrawled messages proclaiming “I am the legion of the night” and images of eyes drawn in blood on a baby’s forehead in suburban homes scattered around Los Angeles County before Caitlin, already reeling from the hospital bombing that nearly killed her best friend, ER nurse Michele Ferreira, catches her first real lead. Hannah Guillory, a plucky sixth grader, finds the Midnight Man attempting to break into her house, rouses her parents to call 911 before he gets inside, and then gives the task force assembled to catch him a description of the UNSUB—unknown subject—and his car that’s just detailed enough to suggest something truly shocking, and readily identifiable, about him. Sheriff’s Department investigator Gil Alvarez finds the theory Caitlin’s based on Hannah’s evidence too far-out to believe, but Caitlin herself is a true believer. Determined that she won’t be outmaneuvered by a killer who’s dramatically stepped up the pace of his murderous attacks, breached his self-imposed limits, and now threatens her star witness with abduction and worse, she hunkers down to catch a quarry whom she says is “like nothing I’ve ever dealt with”—as if she doesn’t know that descriptions like that just set the bar even higher for the inevitable sequel.
Gardiner has mastered the art of the serial-killer saga without an ounce of fat.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982627-51-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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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