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
Grisham' entertaining wartime novel is not lacking in ambition or scope, but the spark of imagination that would grease its...
In 1946, months after returning home to Mississippi from fighting in the Philippines, decorated war hero Pete Banning strolls into the local church and shoots pastor Dexter Bell dead. Even when facing the electric chair, he won't say why he murdered his old friend.
Did it have something to do with word that in Pete's absence his wife, Liza, was seen with Bell, who was known for straying from his marriage? Liza, who three years before her husband's shocking return had been traumatized by a notification that he was missing in action and presumed dead, is in no condition to answer any questions. She is in the state mental hospital, where Pete, head of a prominent farm family in Clanton, got her committed for iffy reasons after his homecoming. Brutally tortured by the Japanese, he himself appears to be in a reduced mental state. This being a Grisham (The Rooster Bar, 2017, etc.) novel, we spend a fair amount of time in the courtroom, first with the insistently tight-lipped Pete's trial and then after Bell's widow files a wrongful death suit against Pete's family that stands to wipe them out. As usual, Grisham does a solid job of portraying a Southern town at a particular moment in time, touching upon social issues as he goes. But the book never overcomes the hole at its center. It's one thing to create a character who is a mystery to those around him, quite another to reveal next to nothing about that character to the reader. After a while, Pete's one-note act becomes a bit of a drag.
Grisham' entertaining wartime novel is not lacking in ambition or scope, but the spark of imagination that would grease its pages is largely missing.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-385-54415-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Harmless bedtime stimulant. Not The Aspern Papers.
With over 46 New York Times bestsellers, Brown (The Alibi, 1999, etc. etc.) has few to envy among living authors, nor does the plot of Envy seem based on Brown’s shortfall in literary esteem. Her heroine, Maris Matherly-Reed, who heads a highly literary independent publishing house, receives in her slush pile a prologue to a novel she can’t refuse. The novel: Envy. And as Maris’s pursuit of the slippery author speeds on, we are given additional chapters of Envy as they are being written by Parker Evans, a Georgia island recluse, secretly the bestselling author Mackensie Roone. As it happens, Maris has married Noah Reed, the one-book author of the celebrated The Vanquished, a book actually written and completed by Parker whom Noah let drown at sea. Or so Noah thought. Now Parker tells the true story of Noah’s attempted murder, sucking in Maris chapter by chapter when she comes down to Parker’s lonely island to urge him on.
Harmless bedtime stimulant. Not The Aspern Papers.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2001
ISBN: 0-446-52713-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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