The usual suspects in Tibbehah County have to make room for a new firecracker in town.
Or more precisely, from town, since no sooner does Tanya Jane Byrd realize that she’s the prime suspect in the murder of her no-account mother, Gina, than she takes to the road with her 9-year-old brother, John Wesley, her boyfriend, Ladarius McCade, and her best friend, Holly Harkins, a waitress at the Captain’s Table who’s thoughtful enough to steal her momma’s minivan for the occasion. Sheriff Quinn Colson, back in the saddle after his latest round of job-related injuries in The Revelators (2020), gives chase along with Deputy U.S. Marshals Lillie Virgil and Charlie Hodge and the folks who really did have Gina Byrd killed, dismembered, and stashed in a bleach-filled barrel in a local dump in the first place. But it’s really TJ’s show, and she makes the most of the spotlight even before she hits the road, demanding that Gina’s much older boyfriend, Chester Pratt, return the $18,980 insurance settlement he took from Gina. Chester, deeply in debt to Dixie Mafia stalwart Johnny T. Stagg, is in no position to pay back the money; in fact, he’s getting serious pressure from Stagg’s enforcers. Things get even hotter when TJ and her crew hook up with budding social influencer Chastity Bloodgood, who offers them the hospitality of her car-dealer father’s vacation home in Hot Springs if only they’ll kill her despised stepmother. The combustible mixture of variously violent personalities leaves less room than usual for Quinn’s self-critical memories of Hamp Beckett, his late uncle and predecessor, and they seem more out of place than usual when they come.
A wild chase with walk-on roles for every lowlife from North Mississippi to New Orleans.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-32839-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
Categories: THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER | SUSPENSE
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
80
GET IT
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. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A poignant story of courage, misogyny, and misused power.
In 1947, Elinor White lives in a village in Kent in a grace-and-favor house, rewarded for her service to the crown, and keeps her own counsel. A farmworkers's cottage nearby is home to the Mackie family: Jim, Rose, and little Susie, who befriends the wary Elinor. Jim comes from a family of notorious London gangsters, and when they want him to return to the fold, they'll resort to violence to convince him. In interspersed chapters we learn about the background that Elinor keeps to herself: She was a spy during both world wars. Back in 1914, in Belgium, 10-year-old Elinor, youngest daughter of a Belgian father and English mother, tries to catch a boat to England along with her mother and sister, Cecily, before the German advance, but they're too late and return to their home, now under occupation. Some time later, a mysterious woman named Isabelle approaches their mother and recruits the two girls to spy on the Germans. It's easy for schoolgirls to appear innocuous as they count the number of trains that pass by their village. The sisters are trained in sabotage and self-defense. Elinor is a natural, but Cecily is not, and when Elinor kills two German soldiers trying to rape her sister, Isabelle smuggles them out to England—where Elinor faces another war, decades later, by working with the Special Operations Executive and returning to Belgium. Now she hopes her contacts from those days will save Jim from the clutches of the Mackie family. Her wartime experiences come back to haunt her, leaving her unable to trust anyone. In the end, it’s the gangsters who tell her the truth that will shatter her world and give her hope for the future.
A tense history-based thriller filled with anguish and suspense.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780062867988
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | THRILLER | HISTORICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
