In a small, nearly inaccessible cavern on an archaeological dig in France, Dr. Rose Gale discovers two entwined skeletons, astonishing evidence of contact between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. Who were these last—and first—peoples?
Scrabbling for survival and with little need for words (indeed, their shortened larynxes might have made modulating language difficult), the last Neanderthal family members think of each other as simply Girl, the remaining daughter; Him, the elder brother; Bent, the younger brother with a deformed arm; Runt, a scrawny foundling taken in by the family; and Big Mother, the matriarch, who, at over 30, is declining rapidly. Transcending the challenges of bringing to life a nearly silent family, Cameron (The Bear, 2014, etc.) generates excitement through a hunt gone unexpectedly wrong and even an uncomfortable sexual tension. Just as Him prepares to meet a suitable mate at the fish run, an annual gathering of the dwindling Neanderthal population, Girl goes into heat. Big Mother attempts to keep the hormonally charged youths apart, but growing up in isolation has made it hard to convey the dangers of incest. Once the taboo is broken, Big Mother has no choice but to cast Girl out. Runt tags along for a while, but his smaller frame, lack of body hair, and inability to pack on muscle trouble Girl. The weeks pass, however, and Girl's worries shift as she realizes she is pregnant. Cameron’s narrative arc shifts between Girl and Rose, separated by time yet inextricably linked through a bit of DNA. Centuries later, Rose, too, faces a cold world: tenure track jobs are scarce in academia, and financial disaster looms for her and her partner, Simon, so she races to secure funding from a prominent museum, excavate the site, and secure her reputation before the birth of their first child.
Across millennia, Neanderthal and Homo sapiens, ancient girl and contemporary woman, hunter and scientist—all share much in common.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-31448-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
Categories: GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | HISTORICAL FICTION | THRILLER | HISTORICAL THRILLER
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BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
79
GET IT
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 REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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