An engrossing murder mystery with strong female characters.
In this thriller, an investigative journalist gets unwittingly caught up in a conspiracy when someone seems to be killing misogynistic Silicon Valley men.
Lou McCarthy prides herself on reporting the truth, even if it means exposing a man with power and connections. Her latest article for the Bay Area Herald centers on the CTO of Raum, a private tech company based in San Francisco. He’s a sexual predator who, according to interviews with several women, has assaulted university students for years. Lou anticipates the standard backlash, but that’s not quite what she gets, especially after the CTO takes his life in a disturbingly public fashion. Things only get worse when another businessman whom Lou exposed two years ago for sexual harassment violently kills himself as well. As some blame the journalist for the men’s deaths, Lou finds herself the target of a militant group of woman-hating trolls that’s gone after her before. Luckily, she has an ally, albeit an unexpected one. Helen Tyler, a member of Raum’s crisis-management team, wants an answer to the mysterious suicides. She and Lou run with the theory that someone set out to ruin these men and possibly drive them to kill themselves. The pair’s investigation turns up evidence that an unknown tormentor indeed singled out the two high-profile assailants. As readers know, “Fate,” so named in a dead man’s journal, has eyes on Lou and Helen for an elaborate plan already underway. What Fate wants isn’t immediately clear, but there’s a good chance that more rich, privileged men will pay—with their wallets or their lives or both.
Carr’s feminist tale highlights complex women. Lou, for example, is a likable, self-assured protagonist, while Helen, who proclaims herself a “hired gun,” has a murky history that makes her hard to trust. Nevertheless, Lou’s mother and her mom’s best friend, Carol Brook, steal every scene they’re in. The two women, even in Atlanta, face off against the “troll army”—not a problem for shotgun-toting Carol. The story can be heavy-handed at times, teeming with deplorable, easy-to-hate male characters, not the least of whom are the trolls, whose online creed is the impudent #MensLivesMatter. Still, Carr deftly explores a number of topical issues, from women overlooked or mistreated in the workplace to men who use their affluence to silence rape survivors. All of this plays against the backdrop of a solid mystery; Lou and Helen’s investigation stirs up myriad unknowns, like Fate’s identity, a burner phone number, and what one man yelled during his iPhone-recorded suicide. The author’s cynical prose aligns with the women’s attitudes, having spent their lives surrounded by loathsome men: “The only reason” Lou “kept banging her head against her computer screen for so long, trying to get someone—anyone—to care about her stories was that she hadn’t been able to come up with a better way to take down these assholes.” Carr skillfully manages a chaotic final act that involves a rescue, a frightening band of investors, and a character who’s perhaps not as appalling as he initially seemed.
An engrossing murder mystery with strong female characters.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 275
Publisher: Snafublishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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