A collection of well-executed, if slightly repetitive, tales of love and ghosts.
Samet (Maltisse File, 2019, etc.) brings together six tales of love between the living and the dead in this collection of supernatural romance novellas.
In the opening tale, “Sadie’s Spirit,” physician Sadie Crawford was once a skeptic who didn’t believe in ghosts—until she became one. Now, she’s trying to find her own killer, and ironically, she needs help from a psychic ex-boyfriend whom she dumped because she didn’t believe in his abilities. In “Cassie’s Chase,” Cassie Chase is a doctor who does believe in ghosts—after all, she’s known one all her life. Now she needs her ghost friend’s help in order to save her newfound love from a potential murderer. Museum curator Phoebe Montgomery, in “Phoebe’s Pharaoh,” is shocked when the spirit from one of her exhibitions—an Egyptian mummy—appears and asks her to help him reunite with the ghost of his wife. Phoebe agrees but not before hiring an attractive ex-Marine to keep her safe during her mission to Egypt. In “Autumn’s Angel,” FBI agent Autumn is on the trail of stolen art. After an obvious suspect is killed, she turns to a handsome psychic to help her solve the crime. In these and two more novellas, women engagingly contend with otherworldly entities and real-world danger while also grappling with that most mysterious of phenomena: the human heart. Samet’s prose vacillates skillfully between various registers, expressing sensuality, suspense, and humor as needed: “Phoebe screamed. She stumbled backward, bumping into the stanchion and the red rope surrounding the sarcophagus, and tumbling to the floor.…‘My apologies,’ the ghost spoke with a deep, male voice. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you. Can you please stop screaming?’ ” The premises may sometimes sound a bit silly in the abstract, but they’re all believable and compelling as the reader turns the pages. Samet manages to sell her notions with a mix of capable writing and imaginative twists on the romance format. Certain tropes reappear—doctor protagonists, unsolved crimes, buried treasure—but if readers enjoy one of these tales, they’ll likely appreciate them all.
A collection of well-executed, if slightly repetitive, tales of love and ghosts.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 522
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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