A grieving mother will do anything to avenge her child in Heigelmann’s novel.
After Madison Sanders’ boyfriend abandoned her when she was pregnant, she had to raise her son, Elijah, as a single parent. But, now she’s in a good place: She has a new best friend, Brittany, at her new marketing job, and her 4-year-old son is healthy and happy. Then, her life takes a dark turn when she becomes the victim of workplace sexual harassment. A group of men who call themselves “the Wolf Pack” have targeted her, and she must decide what to do. Then a shocking and heartbreaking accident occurs, and as a result, Elijah dies and Madison is horribly injured. She’s left to wonder if she is responsible for her child’s death, and if not, then who is? Meanwhile, Don Carson has been put on leave from the police force and has opened his own private detective business. Madison comes to him for help in finding her child’s killer, but Carson is not exactly whom he presents himself to be. Indeed, many things are not as they seem, Madison discovers, as she tries to pick up the pieces of her life; along the way, she falls in love with a new man and turns to her mother for support despite their troubled history. Heigelmann has crafted a striking psychological drama that carefully and thoughtfully explores the despair that victims of abuse and sexual harassment experience. Madison is shown to be a complex character with an arc that’s surprising and compelling. Some secondary characters feel underdeveloped in comparison, but Heigelmann compensates for this with a fast-paced plot, and the chain of events that leads to Madison’s breakdown feels realistic. Overall, it’s a well-crafted story that maintains a good balance of believability and unpredictability.
An engagingly emotional thriller with surprising plot turns.Pub Date: April 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9994898-2-6
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Common Folk Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: THRILLER | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
79
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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. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK TO SCREEN
The Wyoming winter brings maverick game warden Joe Pickett poachers, murderers, spies, and some ferocious bad weather.
Seeking a wounded elk and a marauding wolf during a brutal snowstorm, Joe is amazed to discover a human corpse sticking halfway out of a metal outbuilding on the Double Diamond ranch. While he’s conscientiously photographing the crime scene, somebody starts shooting at him. Ranch foreman Clay Hutmacher refuses to say anything about the building’s purpose until he checks with billionaire ranch owner Michael Thompson; Gov. Colter Allen abruptly orders Joe off the case; and departing Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Scott Tibbs, the boss who’d do anything to avoid having Joe make waves, reports that there’s no body at the place he described. Meanwhile, Joe’s old friend Nate Romanowski, an outlaw falconer, is approached by ex–Army Ranger Jason Demo, who’s trying to attract anti-government malcontents to join the secessionist Sovereign Nation, and Joe realizes that his predatory mother-in-law, Missy, is neglecting her fifth or sixth husband, attorney Marcus Hand, who’s dying of pancreatic cancer, to cozy up to Allen, who plans to launch his campaign for reelection at the public library headed by Joe’s wife, Marybeth. What does the death of University of Wyoming engineering professor Zhang Wei, if that’s really who the dead man was, have to do with all of this malfeasance? Like a patient spider, Box plays out plotline after plotline, balancing his sympathies adroitly between anti-establishment libertarians who’ve had enough of the coastal elites and officers sworn to serve and protect their communities, before knotting them all together with a climactic revelation that for better or worse will leave you gasping.
One of the most successful of Box’s increasingly ambitious have-it-all thrillers.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780593331309
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
Categories: SUSPENSE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION
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