The latest descent into the belly of the beast from Ellis (The Informers, 1994, etc.), who shows a surprising stamina for this sort of thing. Now that he has his formula down pat, Ellis—like Andrew Greeley and Stephen King—is both fun and easy to read. His new glare thriller follows a standard cherchezla femme course, in which the venal antihero forsakes greed in favor of lust only to discover than he's been a sucker from the get-go and that dames who shoot real bullets are far too smart to be for real. The patsy here is one Victor Ward, impresario of what promises to be the hottest nightclub in Manhattan if he can ever get money to open it up. Victor has every reason to hope for success, since he went to Camden College and is in tight with the smart set whose presence usually makes or breaks these places. One of his classmates is the actress Jamie Fields, Victor's old girlfriend, who has just disappeared in England during a movie shoot. Whether this is just one of Jamie's tantrums or a sign of foul play remains to be seen, and Victor is offered $300,000 to go over and quietly hunt her down. After a drunken crossing on the QE2, he hooks up with Jamie easily enough and even picks up the romance where they left it off—along with Bobby Hughes, Jamie's bisexual boyfriend. But Bobby seems to have some unsavory contacts, and the mountains of cash, crates of weaponry, and rooms of Palestinian "associates" that cram Bobby's London townhouse all lead Victor to fear that something sinister is afoot. Long before we discover the true identity of Victor's father (who, it may be said, is very influential in Washington, D.C.), we can smell a setup. The only question that remains by then is: Can help arrive in time? Brain candy for the Vanity Fair set.
Pub Date: Jan. 12, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40412-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1998
Sophomore slump.
More psychological suspense from the author of Final Girls (2017).
Anyone who grew up watching horror movies in the 1980s knows that summer camp can be a dangerous place. It certainly was for Emma Davis during her first stay at Camp Nightingale. The other three girls in her cabin disappeared one night, never to return. Fifteen years have passed, years in which Emma has revisited this ordeal again and again through her work as a painter. When she’s offered another opportunity to spend a summer at the camp, Emma barely hesitates. She’s ostensibly there to serve as an art instructor, but her real mission is to finally find out what happened to her friends. Thrillers are, by their very nature, formulaic. Sager met the demands of the genre while offering a fresh, anxiety-inducing story in Final Girls. The author is less successful here. Part of the problem is the pacing. It’s so slow that the reader has ample time to notice how contrived the novel’s setup is. Emma is clearly unwell, so her decision to go back to the site of her trauma makes some sense, but it’s hard to believe that the camp’s owners would want her back, especially since she played a pivotal role in turning one of them into a suspect and nearly ruining his life. As a first-person narrator, Emma withholds a lot of information, which feels fake and frustrating; moreover, the revelations—when they come—are hardly worth the wait. And it’s hard to trust an author who gets so many details wrong. For example, Emma’s first summer at Camp Nightingale would have been around 2003 or so. It beggars belief that a 13-year-old millennial wouldn’t be amply prepared for her first period, but that’s what Sager wants readers to think. There’s a contemporary scene in which girls walk by in a cloud of baby powder, Noxzema, and strawberry-scented shampoo, imagery that is intensely evocative of the 1970s and '80s—not so much 2018. The novel is shot through with such discordant moments, moments that lift us right out of the narrative and shatter the suspense.
Sophomore slump.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4307-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Cancel your plans for the weekend when you sit down with this book, because you won’t want to move until it’s over.
Suspense queen Ware's (The Woman in Cabin 10, 2016, etc.) third novel in three years introduces four women who have been carrying a terrible secret since their boarding school days, a secret that is about to be literally unearthed.
Isa Wilde, happy in her life as a new mother, receives a text one morning that simply reads, I need you, and hours later, she boards a train bound for the coastal village of Salten with her infant daughter in tow. She has come at her friend Kate’s summons, and soon they are joined by two other women who received the same text, Thea and Fatima. Fifteen years earlier, all four were best friends at Salten House, sneaking off campus on the weekends to spend time with Kate’s father, an art teacher, and her handsome, mysterious brother, Luc. Their school days ended in tragedy and scandal, however, and the four haven’t been back to Salten since they were expelled. Now, a bone has been found in the marshes, and Kate has called the others back in a panic. They know more about the body than they should, but even they don’t know the truth. Ware’s third outing is just as full of psychological suspense as her earlier books, but there is a quietness about this one, a slower unraveling of tension and fear, that elevates it above her others. Though there's still a fair dash of drama, it doesn’t veer into the realm of melodrama, developing consistently with the characters and with their personalities and pasts. Isa is a sympathetic narrative voice though her obsession with the concerns of new parenthood may put some readers off.
Cancel your plans for the weekend when you sit down with this book, because you won’t want to move until it’s over.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5600-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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