A fun thriller set in a deadly jungle.
A debut mystery tells the story of a group of scientists trapped in a remote compound in the Amazon.
Former Army Ranger Karl Shepherd has only been at the Inn—a tiny research outpost in the remote Amazon—for a couple of weeks when one of the biologists disappears. Shepherd and a few of his colleagues hunt for the scientist, who had left the Inn to gather samples of a newly discovered plant that the team believes might provide a cure for Alzheimer’s. The searchers find the biologist’s corpse with a gunshot wound to the skull. Back at the Inn, head scientist John Alderton informs the assembled researchers and staff that the station must be evacuated due to an early start of the rainy season. The only problem is the communication satellite is down, and if it can’t be fixed, it might be weeks or even months before a supply boat is sent to evacuate them. In the meantime, Alderton and the other leaders look for the murder weapon with the help of the quickly exonerated Shepherd while the other scientists and naturalists grumble and accuse one another of foul play. With a cure for Alzheimer’s on the line, the professional ambitions of everyone at the Inn come to the surface. A cure could mean riches and a Nobel Prize. As Allie Temple, the Inn’s head of operations, explains to Shepherd, “The presence of the rainforest exacerbates existing tensions. You haven’t been here long, but believe me, it can really get to you.” Yet would any of the team be willing to kill for the cure? Or is there something even darker lurking in the jungle? Moore excels at communicating the claustrophobia and suspicion of this tiny community stuck in one of the world’s deadliest landscapes. Allie tells Shepherd: “At first it’s the little things, the endless insects, the constant heat, the noises. Then the sheer presence of it, the immensity of it, can overwhelm you. Eventually, it can break you down.” While the characters are rather conventional, the premise makes for a perfect locked-room mystery, and the author plays the various tempers and vanities of her scientists against one another with ingenuity, keeping readers guessing all the way to the end.
A fun thriller set in a deadly jungle.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-925764-78-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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