Think of a haunted house with lots of trap doors, including doors beneath doors.
An Irishwoman’s search for the man who took her sister and Lord knows how many other victims takes a series of whiplash turns.
When Nicki O’Sullivan, who hates having been christened Nicola, goes missing from her home in Dundrum, her sister, Lucy, goes into a panic. Although Nicki is not the first woman in the area to vanish and leave her cellphone behind, the Garda Síochána show little interest in finding her until beautiful teenager Jennifer Gold disappears as well, and her activist mother, Margaret, persuades Superintendent Colin Hall to launch Operation Tide to search for them all. Det. Denise Pope, the decorated Garda most active in the search, and Angela Fitzgerald, the civilian employee of the Missing Persons Unit Denise has commandeered into her investigation while Angela awaits her own certification in the Garda, are hopeful that Lena Paczkowski, who seems to have escaped from someplace she calls “the pink house” only to get run down by a tourist’s car, will be able to give them more specific evidence when she awakens from her coma. Learning that Lena actually died in the ambulance minutes after the accident moves the frustrated Lucy, who’s already started a dangerous investigation of her own, to accept an invitation to a television interview arranged by sketchy true-crime writer Jack Keane. That interview doesn’t resolve the case, but it blows it wide open, and everything from that point on feels like a nightmare within a nightmare. Playing freely with time frames and points of view, Howard provides enough monstrous shocks and surprises throughout this distantly fact-based yarn to make you forgive its resolution, which sheds limited light on the mystery but keeps the pot boiling till the end.
Think of a haunted house with lots of trap doors, including doors beneath doors.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781982694715
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A hyperviolent family saga with surprising amounts of humor and empathy.
A matriarch struggles to keep her family alive and well in a drug-sick patch of Maine.
Babs Dionne, the hero of Currie’s bracing fourth novel, has a chip on her shoulder, and who can blame her? In 1968, when she was 14, she was raped by a policeman in her hometown; after she killed him, she was sent to a convent that helped her evade punishment, but that also separated her from her Francophone upbringing. (Her town, Waterville, has a neighborhood named Little Canada in tribute to its Quebecois roots.) Fast-forward to 2016, and Babs’ role as the town’s doyenne—achieved by running the community’s opioid trade, passively supported by police and religious leaders looking the other way—is starting to collapse. One of her daughters, Sis, is a meth addict who’s gone missing; her grandson needs rescuing from an abusive father; another daughter, Lori, is an Afghan war vet who’s shuffling between heroin and oxy. (We first meet her overdosing in a bar bathroom before a dose of Narcan saves her.) Meanwhile, a hitman for a rival dealer has arrived in town, ready to kill anybody standing in his way. The setting is almost relentlessly tragic and violent—oh, and there’s a meth-dealing serial killer on the loose—but Currie’s focus on Babs’ intense care for her family gives the novel an almost cozy temperament. "If you loved like Babs does, it would break you," a friend says, and Babs exemplifies a family that loves deeply if not always wisely. The plot turns on Babs’ efforts during a summer week to resolve a death in the family, protect who’s left, and start a school that’ll support the community’s dying Francophone culture. Nobody will confuse this for an Anne Tyler novel, but Currie has created a charming community to root for, even if, as the title suggests, all victories here are pyrrhic.
A hyperviolent family saga with surprising amounts of humor and empathy.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851661
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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