by Craig Henderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 2022
A corrosive debut that makes you look forward to a sequel.
A down-on-his-luck Englishman who drives expensive cars really fast hooks up with a ruthless Detroit mobster and his violent crew.
The Brit is one-time rally driver Spencer Burnham, whose fortunes and mental state have been sliding since his wife, a Detroit native, died in a car accident following their move back to the U.S. His foreign car dealership faces foreclosure, and child protective services threatens to take his 11-year-old daughter, whom he raises with his late wife's uncle. After passing what proves to be a driving audition for the mobster, McGrath, who is impressed by Spencer's ability to move fast "without getting noticed," he lands both a high-paying job and a source of relief. Having grown weary of competitive driving, he reclaims his relationship with speed: "There wasn't winning or losing. There was just moving." But once people around him start getting hurt or killed, he tries to extricate himself from the gig. Standing in his way are McGrath, whose fondness for him would not preempt his murder; McGrath's right-hand man, Johnny Boy, a former Chicago mob lawyer; and the Yo-Yo, a bulky ex-con whose specialty is punching someone in the head "hard enough to fracture but not kill." The action rarely stops. When it does, it's for Spencer to deal with CPS case workers—first Lonnie, his bedmate from their second meeting, and then Caitlyn, a harder case who softens for him. Henderson is better at situational descriptions than advancing the plot—endgames are vague. But the first-time novelist brings a fresh, hardscrabble voice to Elmore Leonard land, albeit with more sentimentality.
A corrosive debut that makes you look forward to a sequel.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5970-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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by Joanna Wallace ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2024
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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