A chillingly addictive story of sex, money, romance, and revenge.
A female sex worker decides to take one last job before retiring from the profession, but everything goes wrong.
Dora is a high-end escort in London who’s grown accustomed to her life. She has all the right systems in place to keep herself feeling safe despite the potentially hazardous nature of her profession. Her manager, Elspeth, vets each client, explaining that Dora does not indulge certain fetishes. Elspeth ensures that no one has Dora’s direct line, nor do they know her real name. Dora expects she’ll continue in her line of work indefinitely—until the day a client beats her badly enough to send her to the hospital. Following the beating, Dora’s one true friend, Evan, insists that she must quit. Dora is reluctant to take his advice, which she’s heard many times before, until Evan, who has long been in love with Dora, proposes. To her surprise, she accepts and begins preparing to leave her old life behind. But then a longtime client calls begging Dora to escort him on a getaway where his friends will be coupled up. Dora reluctantly agrees to take on this final assignment, provided there will be no sex. Unfortunately, as the trip unfolds, she realizes she has stepped into something far more nefarious than a simply holiday. At a luxurious but secluded French estate, with a missing cellphone, too much alcohol, and a brain that starts playing tricks on her, Dora suddenly fears for her safety. Told in the first person, primarily from Dora’s perspective, the story is engaging and evocative throughout. Brimming with sensuality and suspense, the novel is also full of inside details about life as a sex worker. Although many questions are left maddeningly unanswered and certain plot points feel flimsy (like the attachment that Evan and Dora feel for each other), the intrigue never wavers. A sudden change of narrator deep in the story feels both jarring and unnecessary, but as soon as the narrative returns to Dora, the story picks up at a furious pace. Readers should be aware of several dark and potentially triggering topics, including drug use, violence, and rape.
A chillingly addictive story of sex, money, romance, and revenge.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-778-38677-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
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
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.
On the isle of Capri, Helen Lingate seeks revenge on the people responsible for her mother’s death 30 years earlier—her own family.
When Sarah Lingate fell to her death on Capri in 1992, she left behind a 3-year-old daughter, Helen, and a legacy as a gifted playwright; her favorite necklace of golden snakes was lost to the sea. Thirty years later, Helen, chafing at the restrictions she’s grown up under as a member of the old-money Lingate family, hatches a plan with her uncle Marcus’ assistant, Lorna Moreno, to blackmail her uncle and her father with that same necklace, which mysteriously entered her possession a few months before. The novel begins on Capri just after Lorna disappears, and then traces her steps from 36 hours earlier. Interweaving chapters from the points of view of Helen, Lorna, and Sarah—as well as, later, a few others—we learn how Sarah gradually became stifled by the constant pressure of keeping up appearances until she became inspired to write a play, Saltwater, that was a not-so-thinly veiled tell-all revealing dark Lingate family secrets. It was shortly after this that she fell to her death. The loss of her mother has come to define Helen’s life, and if she can use the necklace as leverage to escape her family, and maybe learn the truth along the way, she’ll take the risk. Lorna’s motives are both murkier and more straightforward—she’s never had money, and she’s got a chip on her shoulder about it, so splitting 10 million euros with Helen sounds like a way to discard her past and start fresh. These strong, conniving women drive the drama and the narrative, and they are captivating enough that as twist after twist begins to unfurl, the novel still feels character-driven. The end—well, the end shocks. And it’s well earned. By the time the sun sets on the gorgeous excess and rugged coast of Capri, lives will have been destroyed.
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593875551
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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