by Anthony Franze ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 22, 2016
Readers won’t linger over the last page like it’s a good scotch, but Franze’s freshman effort is a painless way to pass the...
Franze’s first fiction foray centers around a potential Supreme Court nominee whose secret involvement in a murder as a young teenager returns to haunt him.
Thirty years ago, Sean Serrat was the commanding general’s son at the U.S. military base in Misawa, Japan, when he and two other boys were involved in the killing of a Japanese storekeeper. After Kenny knifed the man, he swore friends Sean and Juan to secrecy. Years later, Sean’s a noted attorney with a family of his own, and his name is being bandied about as a possible Supreme Court nominee. While Sean’s professional life is heating up, so is his personal one, but in a worrisome way. Sean and his wife, Emily, have been unable to get in contact with their daughter, Abby, a law student. Sean missed the call Abby made to him on the day she disappeared, and his efforts to find her have been futile. Finally, Sean enlists an FBI agent neighbor in the search, and together, they discover Abby’s body. After her boyfriend is arrested and charged with her murder, Sean confronts a drug dealer who may or may not have something to do with Abby’s death. When things go even more sideways, Sean finds himself and his young son, Ryan, constructing alibis to cover their involvement in another crime. Soon, it’s clear to Sean that the events of that long-ago night in Japan may be coming back to haunt him. Franze’s story isn’t rocket science: there’s no deliciously complicated, twisty-turny plot, but that’s OK. Despite his penchant for clichés—a cop vomiting at the sight of a dead body; the careful political correctness adopted by Abby and Sean; and characters who always seem to make the dumbest possible choices—this is a nifty little read.
Readers won’t linger over the last page like it’s a good scotch, but Franze’s freshman effort is a painless way to pass the time.Pub Date: March 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07165-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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
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