An unnerving villain and good guys who may be bad turn this murder tale into an exceptional mystery.
While a string of killings shakes the Jersey Shore, a cult survivor, suffering lapses in memory, searches for his fellow absconders in this debut thriller.
Tom Wallace started his life inside a compound without knowing his parents or his last name. He and pals Luke and Calvin walk out one day in 1936, each making his own way. Years later, Tom copes with periods of memory loss, likely the result of the incessant abuse callously supervised by cult leader “Him.” Following his military discharge, Tom uses old contact information to track down his friends—and a man named Ben, another cult survivor—in New Jersey and Maine. It seems that they’re all psychologically damaged: Calvin turns out to be in an asylum for murder and Luke intermittently experiences a sort of separation, seeing himself as another entity. Beach Haven police officer Becky Carlson, meanwhile, investigates some recent murders. The victims are dissimilar in terms of race and gender but linked by the manner of death: strangulation and broken necks. As Tom reunites with Becky, his New York college girlfriend, both he and Luke worry that they’ve killed someone. Murders back in North Carolina, for example, happen during a Tom blackout, while Luke hardly remembers his fight with a man who turns up dead. At the same time, a hitchhiker, another product of Him’s torture, is unquestionably killing people and ultimately sets his sights on someone Tom knows. Despite the murder case, this novel remains character-driven. The back stories for Tom and Luke are especially fascinating, like their encounters as kids with the hustler and Tom’s namesake, Typhoon Wallace. Atrocities at the compound are made abundantly clear, with Rogers providing only a modicum of details. The hitchhiker’s identity isn’t much of a surprise, but a later scene delving into his psyche is first-rate: eerie and engrossing. It’s fitting that Rogers devotes fewer pages to Becky’s investigation, which doesn’t rival the compound’s sordid history and leads to a confrontation with a killer that’s satisfactory but not very memorable. Nevertheless, the descriptive prose generates indelible images—the compound as a “fraternity forged in hell” and the hitchhiker’s sudden fondness for someone “triggering a host of alien emotions.”
An unnerving villain and good guys who may be bad turn this murder tale into an exceptional mystery.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 305
Publisher: Moonshine Cove Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2016
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
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