A propulsive thriller with teen protagonists in peril.
A YA novel features two teenagers on the run after they’re assaulted by a masked man.
In Credence, Alabama, 17-year-old Angel Lockhart and her boyfriend, 18-year-old Skip Greene, have just left their high school dance. As they walk to Skip’s truck, a masked man holds up a “laser-looking gun,” threatens them, and removes his mask. Then another masked man—Pade Sanders, one of Skip’s best friends—intervenes. He tells them they’re in danger after seeing the face of the first masked man, and instructs them to leave, giving them a case with $100,000. They drive to Angel’s home so she can pack clothes, and after sneaking through her window, she overhears her parents talking to someone named agent Payne. Angel eventually speaks with her father, Jon, and he tells her to get to Detroit. Once at the address, she must say she’s “with the church.” He plans to meet the teens there in 72 hours. Shocked and upset, they agree to hit the road. But after they change cars, Angel sees glowing violet eyes in the nearby woods. In her head, she hears, “You’ll never escape who you are.” Beginning a new series spun off from her Leftover Girl books, Bolick (Fate of War, 2017, etc.) blends paranormal and sci-fi elements within a quick-moving thriller framework. Early on, there’s a mention of Pade’s sister, Bailey, whose disappearance might have involved aliens. Later at a hotel, the plot takes shape when a detective is murdered on a stakeout, his body drained of blood. The author keeps pulses pounding with Skip’s willingness to ditch the cops who have asked the teens to make a statement. While alone on the road, the couple abstain from premarital sex, spend lots of cash, and switch vehicles often. Readers may grow frustrated as important narrative details drop like gifts into the protagonists’ laps; the author tends to tell rather than show audiences. But by the end, everything is connected, with an agency called Earth Under Fire at the center. Angel and Skip are bonded through a twist that should give fresh dimension to the sequel.
A propulsive thriller with teen protagonists in peril.Pub Date: April 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-946089-12-0
Page Count: 261
Publisher: Dirt Road Books
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Thriller fans will find so much space devoted to Gia and Jake’s sexual acrobatics that little time is left for the plot to...
A small Tennessee mountain town is awash in sex and scandal in Belle’s first novel.
Gia Andrews, a disaster relief worker, is also a convicted murderer’s daughter. Her father, Ray, was convicted of killing his wife and Gia’s stepmother, Ella Mae, and sentenced to life in prison. But Ray is dying, and prison officials are releasing him on compassionate grounds; Gia’s uncle Cal, a prominent lawyer, has recruited her to return home from Kenya to care for her dad in his home in Rogersville. Despite the fact that she hasn’t seen her father since she left many years ago, she returns, believing her brother, Bo, and sister, Lexi, will help her, but she finds that neither wants anything to do with their father. Her nearest allies turn out to be the home-care worker Uncle Cal has hired, Fannie, and the new man she meets, a bar-and-grill owner named Jake. When Gia meets a law professor planning to write a book about wrongful convictions, he tells her he believes Ray didn’t kill Ella Mae and that Cal, who was Ray’s attorney, didn’t mount much of a defense. After looking into these allegations, Gia discovers her stepmother had an affair with another man and wonders whether her father could be innocent after all. While trying to unravel the mystery of who really killed Ella Mae, things heat up between Gia and Jake, and suddenly the mystery takes a whole new direction. Belle’s a smooth writer whose characters are vibrant and truly reflect the area where the novel is set, but the plot—while clever—takes a back seat to Gia’s and Ella Mae’s separate, but equally steamy, sexual exploits.
Thriller fans will find so much space devoted to Gia and Jake’s sexual acrobatics that little time is left for the plot to develop.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1722-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
The late (d. 1988), leathery, awesomely unstoppable (over 100 books still in print) L’Amour, still producing fluently from his grave (End of the Drive, 1997), offers one more gathering of unpublished tales, proving again that great writing laughs at death. Showing sheer contempt for slow openings, L’Amour’s seven newly discovered short stories offer some breath-catching first paragraphs echoing with the cold steel click of a Colt .45 hammer being cocked. The lead story, “The Man from Utah,” polishes L’Amour’s walnut prose to its glossiest grain. Bearing a fearsome reputation as a gunfighter, Marshall Utah Blaine arrives in Squaw Creek to investigate 14 recent murders (three were marshals) by a cunning bandit masquerading as an upright citizen. By a process of deduction, the shrewd Blaine narrows his suspects down until he has the killer. “Here Ends the Trail” opens with a High L’Amouresque Miltonic Inversion: “Cold was the night and bitter the wind and brutal the trail behind. Hunched in the saddle, I growled at the dark and peered through the blinding rain. The agony of my wound was a white-hot flame from the bullet of Korry Gleason.” This builds to an explosive climax that mixes vengeance with great-heartedness. “Battle at Burnt Camp,” “Ironwood Station” and “The Man from the Dead Hills” all live up to the melodrama of their blue-steel titles. “Strawhouse Trail” opens memorably with the line: “He looked through his field glasses into the eyes of a dying man.” And never lets up. The title novella tells of Lona Markham’s unwilling engagement to six-foot-five, 250-pound, harsh-lipped Frank Mailer, who has “blue, slightly glassy eyes.” Will Lance Kilkenny, the mysterious Black Rider, save her from indestructible Mailer? Stinging stories of powerful men against landscapes you can strike a match on.
Pub Date: May 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-553-10833-6
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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