by Sam Christer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2011
Readers will learn a few things about Stonehenge, but not enough to justify the time required to finish the book.
Following his father's suicide, the son of a famous British archaeologist and relic collector discovers that the old man was closely involved with an ultra-secret cult of Stonehenge worshippers, one of whose key rituals demands fresh supplies of human blood.
Part cult thriller, part police procedural, Christer's first novel takes us deep into a hidden sanctuary where devout followers are painfully initiated and kidnap victims are slaughtered according to ancient rites. Gideon Chase, long estranged from his father Nathaniel, becomes obsessed with the old man's secret self after discovering journals about his doings at Stonehenge, some of them written in code. Gideon himself is the beneficiary of a cleansing ritual that eliminated a childhood disease and has immunized him from even the slightest cold ever since. On the portentous eve of the summer solstice, he is targeted by the cult. Meanwhile, Caitlyn Lock, the misbehaving daughter of the American vice president, who is attending school in London, is abducted at Stonehenge along with her new rich playboy. He had the unfortunate idea of thinking driving there would make for a cool romantic getaway. Ambitious DI Megan Baker, drawn into the plot when Gideon is attacked in his father's country mansion, has her efforts frustrated by her bureaucratic, sexist bosses and complicated by her untrustworthy ex-husband. And then there is the celebrity American bounty hunter who has come to save Caitlyn, and a flock of heavily weaponized Apache helicopters you can't wait to see blow stuff up. It's a credit to Christer, a documentary filmmaker, that he makes the story as readable and, for a while, as involving as it is. But Dan Brown he's not. As the story wobbles toward its predictable climax, you won't be looking forward to a sequel. This is a book best passed on to someone for whom the Stonehenge setting will matter more than anything.
Readers will learn a few things about Stonehenge, but not enough to justify the time required to finish the book.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59020-676-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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by Sam Christer
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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by Kathy Reichs
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by Kathy Reichs
by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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