A compelling debut that glimmers with the lights of the forest as it unwinds its tale.
A murder on the Appalachian Trail draws two sisters deeper into the mystery of their mountain home.
Sheila and Angie are growing up in a ramshackle house at the top of a “long, rutted lane,” where their extreme poverty singles them out even in the generally impoverished environs of 1980s Appalachia. Along with their mother, Bonnie, and an elderly relative, Thena, the girls scrape by, making due with meat from the rabbits they raise in the yard, vegetables from their garden, and the wild bounty of the mountain to whose side they cling. As if the realities of their lives weren’t difficult enough, both girls are also afflicted with elements of mountain magic that make them seem even stranger. Twelve-year-old Angie—a fierce girl whose daydreams all feature guerrilla warfare against invading Dolph Lundgren–lookalike Russians—always carries a pack of index cards on which she’s drawn arcane characters like the Dustman, The Twins With Too Many Teeth, and Tangle of Rabbits. She uses the cards for divination and protection, but sometimes the cards seem to use her, choosing for themselves where they will be dealt. Seventeen-year-old Sheila, who’s far more traumatized by their isolation, holds herself apart from the rest of the family, intent on guarding her twin secrets: her love for her classmate Juanita and the invisible rope that has been thickening around her neck since childhood. When two women hiking the Appalachian Trail are beaten to death in their tent only two ridges from the girls’ home, the whole mountain community—and indeed the mountain itself—is galvanized by the rabid brutality. Each in her own way, Sheila and Angie set out to resolve the wrongness that has entered their world in the murderer’s wake. A dense, atmospheric novel whose setting operates as fully as any of its characters, Alering’s debut is one part fairy tale, one part thriller, and one part ethnography of an area that endures in our mythopoetic memories even as it vanishes from the face of the land.
A compelling debut that glimmers with the lights of the forest as it unwinds its tale.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781959030584
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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
Maybe not the most thrilling thriller, but the role of AI in coping with grief gives this novel pathos and interest.
A widowed and disgraced plastic surgeon is drawn into a Russian oligarch’s evil schemes.
Witherspoon’s adult fiction debut, co-authored with thrillermeister Coben, opens as heart surgery performed by Dr. Marc Adams in a North African refugee camp is interrupted by the explosive invasion of armed militants. It's the last we will see of Marc in this dimension. The next chapter jumps ahead one year to a ceremony at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where his widow, Maggie McCabe, is supposed to be presenting an award in honor of her mother. Miserable and anxious about appearing in public after having lost her medical license, she consults with her late husband on her phone—not via supernatural means, but using a "griefbot," an amazingly lifelike and functional AI app created by her genius sister, Sharon. Once the griefbot coaxes her to brave the sneering masses, she learns she’s been replaced on the podium anyway. But she runs into a former professor, a celebrity plastic surgeon, who requests a meeting with her at his office in New York and won’t take no for an answer. Next thing she knows, there’s $10 million in her bank account and she’s on a private plane heading to a palace outside Moscow where she’s been engaged to perform off-the-record surgery on billionaire Oleg Ragoravich (new face) and his girlfriend, Nadia (new boobs). And…we’re off. A whirl of surgeries, chases, and escapes ensues as Maggie gradually comes to understand who these people are and what they have in mind for her, and how it connects to Marc and their missing friend and business partner, Trace Packer. She is aided by her delightful father-in-law, Porkchop, owner of a biker bar in New York City and a very handy guy to have on your team if you've run afoul of an international criminal organization. From the palace in Rublevka the action moves to Dubai and then Bordeaux, climaxing in a high-stakes illegal heart transplant. But wait—is Marc really dead? What happened to Trace? Who is Nadia really? Though these smoldering questions don’t quite catch fire, it's a good first try for Witherspoon.
Maybe not the most thrilling thriller, but the role of AI in coping with grief gives this novel pathos and interest.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781538774700
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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