Crushingly intimate, a remarkably accurate and poignant dissection of PTSD.
A major in the Canadian military battles PTSD, torn between the influences of a psychologist he feels fails to understand him and an angry friend and ex-soldier.
In this debut novel, Maj. Hugh Dégaré wakes up one night to his wife, Elizabeth, in tears, recoiling from him in fear after his nightmares caused him to strike her in his sleep. These dreams have haunted him for two years, since his third tour of Afghanistan ended. This, along with his anger, depression, and sexual dysfunction, forces Hugh to admit he has PTSD. But he still serves in the military, dealing with a boring desk job at Canada’s National Defense Headquarters, and fears the stigma of mental illness that will be attached to him if his condition is discovered. He begrudgingly begins seeing Dr. John Taylor, but the therapy is challenging, and Hugh feels that the physician cannot appreciate what it is like to be a soldier. For further help, he reconnects with his old army buddy Daryl Robertson, but Daryl has grown bitter and cruel after losing both legs in combat. He now spends his days railing against the government for the poor care it provides veterans, suggesting the public needs a drastic—perhaps violent—wake-up call. Luft’s book is an honest and nonjudgmental account of a soldier’s journey after returning home from war. Hugh’s daily battles are compounded by the fact that life goes on, from his wife’s tragic pregnancy and the funeral of a friend to his father-in-law’s efforts to undermine him. Each stressor only pushes Hugh further away from being OK again. Therapy is approached in realistic terms, acknowledging that treatment will often open old wounds never properly healed. It forces Hugh to recount and confront his time and actions in Bosnia and Afghanistan. Hugh’s and Daryl’s frustrations with the replacement of the regimented aspects of the service with the bureaucracies of civilian life are understandable, though not excusable, reasons for their actions, from Daryl’s abuse toward his wife to Hugh’s growing comfort in withdrawing from Elizabeth. Hugh starts to spend more time alone with his anger and Daryl’s firearms, considering turning them on himself or even others. To heal, Hugh must figure out how it all went bad, and the reader discovers each heartbreaking detail along with him.
Crushingly intimate, a remarkably accurate and poignant dissection of PTSD.Pub Date: June 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-942645-49-8
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Inkshares
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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