A gritty cat-and-mouse game that deftly delivers classic hard-boiled thrills.
In this mystery debut, a private detective investigates a drowning in Massachusetts.
Sometimes, you really don’t have a choice. Drew Law, a private eye, widower, and single father, looks into a drowning in the Charles River. But both the body and the interest of the enigmatic Ashley Tinder turn the routine case into a whirlpool from which he can’t escape. On the other side of the river, a man named Jack has spent years going down a dark path and waiting for the time his masterful misdeeds might come to light, all stemming from one day in his teen years when he was caught between a rock and a hard place. The novel switches back and forth between Drew’s present-day investigation and Jack’s stomach-turning life history, and the contrast between the world-weariness of the former and the sociopathy of the latter is very effective in driving the narrative forward. At the same time, switching between timelines gives the story an opportunity to delve deeper into the characters’ backgrounds, whether that’s the trauma of Jack’s abusive father, the mystery of the death of Drew’s wife, or Ashley’s role in what might be a set of serial killings—or even a conspiracy. As more information comes to light through both the past and present, the players intersect more and more, and the stakes rise as well. It’s a difficult balance to strike between the character relationships, the drama of their histories, and the intrigue of the current action, but the pacing is brisk and certain, and nearly all the elements of an intriguing mystery shine through. The prose can be a little awkward at times, but the dialogue is strong and acts as a foundation for much of the stark tale. All in all, it’s an entertaining, fast-paced reading experience that fans of the genre won’t want to pass up. Some readers may be frustrated by the fact that the novel doesn’t end with complete closure, leaving room for a sequel. Still, they will find themselves waiting for the next chance to turn the pages of this exciting world.
A gritty cat-and-mouse game that deftly delivers classic hard-boiled thrills.Pub Date: April 21, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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