Nearly a decade and a half after abducting teenager Lizzy Gardner, her captor is ready to seek revenge on the one who got away, in Ragan’s white-knuckled thriller,
When she was 16-years-old, Lizzy Gardner lied to her parents about spending the night with friends and snuck out with her boyfriend, Jared. When he dropped her off a block from her home, it was just too easy for the kidnapper to switch gears and take Lizzy instead of the Anderson girl. But after two months of torture, including being poisoned and burned, Lizzy escaped. At 30-years-old, she’s now a private investigator who spies on unfaithful spouses and teaches girls how to defend themselves. Jared is now an FBI agent and, after having not spoken to Lizzy since the abduction, he contacts her because the madman who took her is at it again—and he left a personal note for Lizzy with his latest victim. In James Patterson style, Ragan choreographs a tightly woven dance among a large cast who all have a connection to Spiderman, the moniker given to the killer because of his penchant for torturing victims with creepy crawlers. Ragan’s psychopath is on a mission to teach “bad” girls a lesson and punishes them according to their vice. With no shortage of plot swells, Lizzy and Jared, along with Sgt. Jimmy Martin and even Lizzy’s self-defense student, Hayley Hansen, are determined to rescue Spiderman’s latest victim, someone Lizzy would risk her life for. Even the killer’s own sister is looking for him and may hold the clue to his depravity, where slicing a pinky off a victim thrills him. Although the story boasts a couple of oddities, such as why Ragan chose similar names for her characters (Warner, Winters, Walker; Crawford, Crowley) and why nearly every character is on the verge of divorce, or divorced, the masterful storytelling and inventive plot trample these minor inconveniences. Lizzy is Hannibal Lechter’s Clarice, and although parallels to Silence of the Lambs abound, Ragan’s thriller stands on its own. The satisfyingly frightful episode of a calculating cutthroat.
Pub Date: May 29, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463717094
Page Count: 348
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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