An old-fashioned, over-the-top crime novel for readers who think they don’t make them like they used to.
Kane offers a suspense novel that begins with a scene straight out of a classic noir movie.
A mysterious figure sabotages the brakes on a shiny Jaguar convertible and forces it off a mountain highway near Lake Tahoe. As a result, former Mardi Gras queen Norma Jean Darden dies in a ball of flames as the unnamed killer waves goodbye. Newspaper reporter Jane Paul starts calling other Mardi Gras queens for comment on the death, but the first several people she tries are also dead—and others soon meet similarly gruesome fates. Meanwhile, the killer reports each of his triumphs to his elderly, wheelchair-bound mother. Jane finally persuades her editor that all the deaths may be connected, and she flies to New Orleans to investigate further. A large, African-American man accosts her at the airport; she firmly tells him to get lost, but he turns out to be homicide cop Jimmy Hollingsworth, and they team up to flush out the killer. The FBI joins the chase, which becomes more urgent when the president and first lady agree to be the king and queen of the upcoming Mardi Gras parade. There’s something goofily cinematic about this novel, as it’s told in the present tense with shadowy glimpses of action, cameralike close-ups (“The Jaguar speeds by throwing up pebbles and snow in its wake”), and abrupt cuts between scenes. There are also asides meant to keep readers breathless at every plot twist: “This is a real Sickie!” says the narrator about the serial killer at one point; at another, she says, “Ooops! The plot thickens!” These moments are more likely to make genre fans giggle than gasp, though, particularly as the book’s plot seems almost entirely composed of classic mystery-movie tropes, from its opening scene to its climactic revelation about the carefully gowned old lady in the wheelchair. The dialogue is similarly dated; when the president and first lady agree not to leave their suite, for example, Hollingsworth says that it’s “really white of them,” and an FBI agent frets about being called “a worry-wart.”
An old-fashioned, over-the-top crime novel for readers who think they don’t make them like they used to.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2015
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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