A solid suspense tale, despite a somewhat overcomplicated structure.
In Hand’s thriller, a group of friends with a grim secret uncover a revenge plot that threatens Chicago.
Thirty-something venture capitalist Rylan “Ry” Birk; his younger sister, Katie, a U.S. Department of Labor investigator; chemical company director Bobby Doogan; and homicide detective Dan Wilson have been friends since childhood, but they’ve become somewhat estranged from the final member of their group, Connor Clayton. He’s been in an emotional tailspin in the years following an incident involving an unusual gun called a Borchardt C-93. The weapon belonged to JD, a drifter the 17-year-old friends met near some railroad tracks while getting drunk and high. An impaired Katie, while playing around with the gun, fired a wild shot into the air that, they found out later, may have killed an elderly man. (Later, Connor testified that JD, who killed a convenience store clerk the same night, was responsible for the errant shot.) Many years later, the group has largely made peace with their complicity in the cover-up—but then Connor goes missing, and it appears that JD might be back in their lives. Soon they find themselves uncovering a different, more wide-ranging conspiracy at Ry’s firm. Ry is preparing to close a multimillion-dollar deal with the company Bobby works for, and the siblings who own it—Thaddeus and Sofia—appear to be arranging a deadly attack as an act of vengeance. How the pair got to this point is revealed in a series of flashbacks, set over multiple decades. Hand’s briskly paced thriller tells a gripping story of how careless actions can ruin lives. The narrative intriguingly delves into the working-class background of the friend group and the white-collar crimes that drove the vengeful siblings to extremes—they recruit people who’ve experienced tragedies similar to theirs. Readers may wish that the work had explored class issues in more depth, and the novel could have benefited from a more straightforward presentation; readers receive enough information to put everything together long before the characters do. Still, the book will satisfy many thriller fans.
A solid suspense tale, despite a somewhat overcomplicated structure.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9798994794913
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2026
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
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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