Dark and quirky fun.
An unlikely duo deals with multiple connected murders.
Andrew Fechmeier, dying from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, stitches a secret object in the suit he plans to be buried in and leaves it in a funeral home. Then in a motel, an attacker stabs him to death when he doesn’t divulge where the object is, setting up a series of slayings in this tense thriller. The trouble had started years ago with a group of teenagers calling themselves The Breakfast Club, named after the movie. They’d stolen the object that now is getting them killed, one by one. This is the third outing for Zig and Nola, who are not friends or colleagues—she doesn’t even especially like him, but each has helped the other in times of dire need. Jim “Zig” Zigarowski is a skilled mortician who has helped make many combat victims look presentable. An amiable but odd fellow, “it took a mortuary to make him feel alive." He speaks kindly to the dead as he stitches together parts of their skulls and dresses them presentably for viewing. “You know how to speak funeral,” he’s told, and when he spots fake morticians at the funeral home, he sees trouble. Nola Brown is a sketch artist whose personality grew a protective shell due to an unusually messed-up childhood. Nola’s mother, Daniella, died, supposedly by suicide, when Nola and her twin brother, Roddy, were 3 years old. But she has Zig’s admiration and gratitude, as she had saved the lives of both Zig’s daughter and Zig himself. But Roddy, now a cop estranged from Nola, believes their mother was murdered by the same person who killed Fechmeier and for the same reason. Nola has no good feelings for Daniella and would as soon forget her. Nola generally walks around feeling pissed, but underneath that hardness is a smart, caring person. There will probably never be an action figure of Zig the amiable mortician who is strangely attracted to pain, because the real energy comes from Nola, who may or may not survive hellacious hand-to-hand combat with a bad guy.
Dark and quirky fun.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780062892430
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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