A cinematic page-turner steeped in atmosphere and just awaiting its adaptation to miniseries.
Having served her powerful employer at the expense of all else, a devoted secretary finds herself a pawn in her boss’s ruthless game—a betrayal that comes with consequences.
Reliable and conscientious to a fault, Christine Butcher is hired as secretary and personal assistant to Mina Appleton just as Mina is coming into power, having gently ousted her aging father from the family business. And so it is that Christine finds herself the right-hand woman to the new chair of Appleton’s Supermarkets, a chain that was once “synonymous with fair trade and good practice”—principles that don’t much interest Mina. Petite and polished—a media darling who charms the country on national TV—Mina demands total allegiance, and Christine, a workhorse who prides herself on absolute discretion, is only too happy to oblige. Catering to Mina becomes not just her duty, but her obsession; Christine serves Mina first and always, at the expense of her own family. “We flourished together, Mina and I,” explains Christine. “She, undoubtedly, the dominant species. I, like a woodland plant, able to blossom in her shade. I was good groundcover, you might say.” When Mina’s business practices become the subject of a legal investigation, Christine is there—good groundcover—assisting her, making moves that will reroute the course of her own life. “I made some questionable choices,” she reflects ominously in the novel’s opening pages. “Choices I suspect many would have made in my position.” But the power dynamic will shift: Christine, the silent, watchful, secretary, will not allow Mina’s betrayal to go unpunished—no matter the personal cost. Mina and Christine—neither quite fleshed out—seem to exist only in relation to one another; this is not a book about character but about mutual destruction. This gives the novel a somewhat flimsy quality, but what it lacks in substance it makes up for with style. Knight lays it on thick, foreshadowing the violence to come early and often, giving the book an over-the-top gothic quality; not subtle but an awful lot of fun.
A cinematic page-turner steeped in atmosphere and just awaiting its adaptation to miniseries.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-236235-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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
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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