In 1950, an idealistic New York couple and their two kids resettle on a cattle ranch in South Dakota only to find their initial success undermined and destroyed by right-wing fanatics in a novel based loosely on the actual case of a family victimized by anti-Communist hysteria in Okanogan, Washington, during the McCarthy era.
As the novel opens in 1985, Jo Kusek returns after 20 years to Rapid City under heartbreaking circumstances: a home invasion has left her younger brother Lance’s wife dead, Lance and his young son in critical condition. Smith (A Star for Mrs. Blake, 2014, etc.) then cuts to 1950: 4-year-old Jo and baby Lance arrive in Rapid City with their parents, Cal, a 42-year-old Yale-educated sometime union lawyer and WWII fighter pilot, and nurse Betsy, who briefly belonged to the Communist Party in her teens. They've decided to start over in Rapid City, where Cal’s Army buddy Scotty Roy lives. Quick learners, the Kuseks buy a spread and, despite total agricultural ignorance and inexperience, are soon among the most successful ranchers in town. Democrat Cal also builds an increasingly successful political career for himself in heavily Republican South Dakota. But religious bigotry (neighbors wonder if they're Jewish, though they're not) and virulent anti-communism flourish alongside neighborliness in Rapid City until xenophobic fearmongering turns all the Kuseks’ lives upside down. Unfortunately, by painting Cal and Betsy as such maddeningly superior individuals—“There were no jobs, really, either one couldn’t perform”—compared to the narrow-minded, cartoonishly dimwitted but more colorfully portrayed locals, Smith diminishes both the political and personal drama. Although the novel returns in intervals to the 1985 crime, there is little suspense in the episodic reveal, and the connections between events in 1985 and 30 years earlier, meant to create drama, feel manufactured at best.
A tragedy built on accumulating misunderstandings between people of different political persuasions should be riveting in this political season, but flat prose and a self-righteous tone make for a dreary read.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-87421-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
84
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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 REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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