Highly charged, melodramatic, and full of summer atmosphere, albeit overstuffed with detail.
In this debut novel, a dangerous familial legacy threatens the summer peace of a Nova Scotian village where townies and rich visitors mingle and sometimes collide.
Blackburn Village, on the southern coast of Nova Scotia, has for generations been home to wealthy summer residents. The townspeople earn much-needed income as caretakers during the offseason and, during the warmer months, as babysitters, gardeners, cooks, launderers, and housekeepers. Though the rich folk seem to have it made, fissures exist. Bartlett Carlisle, patriarch of a large brood of nine, is a controlling narcissist—and worse. Last summer, Bart pulled out a hunk of his wife Daphne’s hair during an argument, of which she is chillingly reminded on her first day back in Blackburn: “she noticed a clump of her own blond hair, neatly tied in a pale blue ribbon and sitting in a clamshell ashtray.” As Blackburn residents enjoy summer fun and love affairs, Daphne learns a horrifying secret about Bart’s genetic makeup that will have dramatic consequences. In her debut, Ogilvie manages her large cast of characters well as she skillfully conveys the beauty and appeal of Blackburn while also drawing out its underlying tensions. However, the rich characters tend to sound like a parody of themselves: “Isn’t this glorious? Isn’t this simply glorious?”; “It’s such a divine day”; “that sounds absolutely frightful.” Harper, a young Blackburn resident, offers interest, yet she’s such a paragon that she seems a type, not a person. Ogilvie tries to create suspense, but the book’s sprawl and lack of focus—overly detailed descriptions of clothes, crockery, food, logistical arrangements, and such—drain it. Meanwhile, readers never learn the mystery of the blue-beribboned hair. More crucially, Bart’s genetic scheme that so appalls Daphne is barely different from using donor eggs and sperm, and the postulated mechanism of harm—a spontaneously generated virus that somehow becomes a genetically transmissible illness—is scientifically dubious to say the least.
Highly charged, melodramatic, and full of summer atmosphere, albeit overstuffed with detail.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-5621-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
