Without the humor that lightened True Crime (1995), but, still, certain to please readers who like their entertainment with...
Edgar-winning Klavan (The Uncanny, 1998, etc.) offers a stylish new thriller that turns on a jazz variation of the Orpheus and Eurydice legend.
In a fabulous, Lockerbie-like opening, a 747 jet blows up at 30,000 feet, raining fire from its freshly filled gas tanks on a tourist town below, where houses explode and burning people run everywhere. A lone surviving passenger (vice president of Helix Pharmaceuticals) walks out of the woods without a scratch on him, carrying a little girl named Amanda. Klavan then shifts into the Greek legend. Orpheus is depressed black tenor sax player Lonnie Blake, whose wife was murdered two years earlier. When a prostitute named Carol begs him to take her into his apartment and save her from a gravel-faced figure in the night, Lonnie seems to recover his dead wife Suzanne. But Carol leaves, and Lonnie starts a long chase after her, only to discover she’s also being pursued by super-smooth, ice-cold killer Winter (or shall we say Pluto?). Winter has a vast lech for Carol, but what he really wants is her five-year-old daughter Amanda, who can heal terminal cancer victims and raise the dead. She and her mother complete the character of Eurydice (or spring-bearing Persephone). Winter is North American bureau chief of Executive Decisions, a private force that hires itself to companies and countries for bloody covert actions. E.D. has been retained by billion-dollar Helix Pharmaceuticals to recover the offspring of Carol’s dead husband, a healer the drug company used for experiments in the genetically enhanced laying-on of hands. A story that opens with dynamite should close with TNT, and Klavan’s sixth outing does indeed end strikingly on a reversal of the legend.
Without the humor that lightened True Crime (1995), but, still, certain to please readers who like their entertainment with literary flourishes. And, yes, there is a cave of Tartarean darkness. ($300,000 ad/promo)Pub Date: July 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-16895-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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