An engaging and suspenseful mystery team-up.
In Lewis’ sequel thriller, a woman on the run finds danger in a new town and common ground with her ex-cop employer.
Kim Jackson fled Chicago and took on a new identity after her former boss tried to frame her for embezzlement; for a time, she lived in tiny Montrose, Colorado, where she got involved in a murder investigation. Now she’s making a living in the Rocky Mountain town of Durango as a part-time bookkeeper and a live-in housekeeper for wheelchair-bound former cop Lena Fallon (“an unrelenting dark storm of anger, a broken soul locked in a broken body”). Kim soon realizes, however, that it’s hard to escape the people in her past. While Kim is aware of Lena’s former profession, she’s unsure of the circumstances surrounding her departure from the force. Though the two women maintain a tempestuous rapport (“She and I are not and never will be friends,” says Kim at one point), they slowly discover that they can help each other come to terms with their private struggles. At the same time, they get mixed up in the affairs of wealthy Paul Kennerly, the great-grandson of a Colorado land baron and city councilman. As Kim begins to unravel under the constant pressure of living the life she’s chosen, she and Lena try to get to the bottom of crimes that changed their lives forever. Lewis delivers a fast-paced, tightly written mystery with two strong and convincing main characters who find a connection due to dark events in their pasts. It’s not for nothing that the author reminds readers that “every person walking this planet, bar none, has a secret,” as Lena says. Throughout, the author illuminates the action with vivid, atmospheric descriptions of the Colorado setting, as when she notes that the “San Juan Mountains inked a purple-black silhouette across the sky. The world had a profound stillness, carved beneath a milky-white canopy of stars.”
An engaging and suspenseful mystery team-up.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73729-772-7
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Arrow Road Press
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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