McGroarty’s debut novel tells the story of a troubled ex-con and a city bus driver who has visions.
The story focuses on the strangely intertwined lives of Jake Mott and Charlie Boone. Jake is a man just exiting prison after a stay of 30 years, and bus driver Charlie is a young husband and father with a troublesome past and disturbed sleep. Jake fears God but has never confessed the extent of his crimes; Charlie sees imaginary people and hears voices. Charlie’s marriage is suffering, his job performance isn’t up to snuff, and his catatonic mother doesn’t recognize him. His wife, Lisa, takes him to a psychic, who tells him that he’s destined for a hard, lonely life; meanwhile, his escalating visions seem to have something to do with a wildfire in California. At the same time, Jake settles into a camper in a park nearby. When the two men’s paths converge when Charlie’s son loses his puppy, Charlie is immediately struck by a strong sense of recognition. It soon becomes clear that the two men share a connection that neither could have ever anticipated. When they meet again in a neighborhood bar, Charlie thinks, “This was it. It was all about this man.” It turns out that there’s a spot in the California desert where remnants of Jake’s past lie buried. On their way to find it, Jake and Charlie take a journey that transforms and restores them both. McGroarty handles his diverse cast of characters well, from aging felon Jake to Charlie’s severely mentally ill mother. The members of the Boone family, as well as the Mott family of Jake’s memory, respond realistically to hardships and share sometimes-strained bonds. McGroarty’s decision to put his protagonists on the road allows him to vividly detail who they are and who they become against the backdrop of the Midwest and West. He also includes rich regional nuances and even an appropriate musical soundtrack: “She was reminded of a line from that Nat King Cole song. ‘When I give my heart, it will be completely.’ Well, years ago she’d given her heart to Charlie, and there’d be no taking it back...ever.”
A well-told story of destiny and redemption set against a distinctly American backdrop.
Pub Date: May 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615977539
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Basking Ridge Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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BOOK TO SCREEN
The plot is absurd, of course, but the book is a definitive pleasure. Prepare to be absorbed—and in more ways than one.
Another Brown (Inferno, 2013, etc.) blockbuster, blending arcana, religion, and skulduggery—sound familiar?—with the latest headlines.
You just have to know that when the first character you meet in a Brown novel is a debonair tech mogul and the second a bony-fingered old bishop, you’ll end up with a clash of ideologies and worldviews. So it is. Edmond Kirsch, once a student of longtime Brown hero Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist–turned–action hero, has assembled a massive crowd, virtual and real, in Bilbao to announce he’s discovered something that’s destined to kill off religion and replace it with science. It would be ungallant to reveal just what the discovery is, but suffice it to say that the religious leaders of the world are in a tizzy about it, whereupon one shadowy Knights of Malta type takes it upon himself to put a bloody end to Kirsch’s nascent heresy. Ah, but what if Kirsch had concocted an AI agent so powerful that his own death was just an inconvenience? What if it was time for not just schism, but singularity? Digging into the mystery, Langdon finds a couple of new pals, one of them that computer avatar, and a whole pack of new enemies, who, not content just to keep Kirsch’s discovery under wraps, also frown on the thought that a great many people in the modern world, including some extremely prominent Spaniards, find fascism and Falangism passé and think the reigning liberal pope is a pretty good guy. Yes, Franco is still dead, as are Christopher Hitchens, Julian Jaynes, Jacques Derrida, William Blake, and other cultural figures Brown enlists along the way—and that’s just the beginning of the body count. The old ham-fisted Brown is here in full glory (“In that instant, Langdon realized that perhaps there was a macabre silver lining to Edmond’s horrific murder”; “The vivacious, strong-minded beauty had turned Julián’s world upside down”)—but, for all his defects as a stylist, it can’t be denied that he knows how to spin a yarn, and most satisfyingly.
The plot is absurd, of course, but the book is a definitive pleasure. Prepare to be absorbed—and in more ways than one.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-51423-1
Page Count: 461
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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