A truly chilling thriller with a twist so quiet, you never hear it coming.
A tight group of college friends fight to keep their relationships from splintering under the pressure of secrets in Brockman’s debut.
When Malin’s parents drop her off at Hawthorne College, her father whispers one word of advice: Pretend. Malin has always been quiet and introverted, but this self-imposed separation has given her ample opportunity to hone her perception and observation skills. Deciding to branch out and find some friends in order to keep her parents happy, Malin chooses Ruby to be her best friend. Pretty, outgoing, and athletic, Ruby is Malin’s way into a small but insular group: Gemma, Max, John, and Khaled. During freshman year, the six survive the usual college shenanigans—wild parties, drunken hookups, last-minute study binges—before moving in together. But Malin can see the cracks in their friendships from the beginning: how John bullies Max; how Gemma drinks herself into oblivion to avoid her loneliness; how Khaled needs constant reassurance; how Ruby bows to John's every wish. And then there’s Malin herself, top student on campus, the silent witness to so many conflicts. All six of the friends have secrets. By senior year, each of them is buckling under the twin pressures of loyalty and knowledge. Will they make it out alive? By telling parts of the story out of sequence, Brockman successfully builds each character in fragments, preventing us from seeing the full context until close to the end. The college-centered plot is reminiscent of many novels that have come before about quirky kids forming a family of sorts only to destroy each other—Tana French’s The Likeness, Donna Tartt's The Secret History—but the development of Malin as a narrator is truly inspired. While French and Tartt use the outsider-as-narrator to further emphasize the group's isolation and the narrator's failure to find true acceptance, Brockman's Malin draws riveting attention to humankind's vulnerability to evil. She is a shadowy figure; an unreliable narrator we get to know through subtle hints and slanted comments in addition to flashbacks.
A truly chilling thriller with a twist so quiet, you never hear it coming.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-1721-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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