A tale told in chilling crescendo.
Story of a startling, revelatory night of violence for a quiet retired couple who shelter a young psychotic camper.
Thayer (A Certain Slant of Light, 2000) seems determined to flex her novelistic muscles, though her narrative starts tranquilly enough, with our close, elderly couple setting out in the bucolic October morning to paint watercolors of pines and mushrooms: Jessica taught years of high-school history, while her husband, Carl, a Holocaust survivor, is a retired surgeon. Their three grown children have mostly entered the wider world, except the oldest, Sylvie, who is schizophrenic and living in a nursing home some miles away. Little by little, details of the daughter’s dangerously erratic behavior over the years emerge before the home calls to say that Sylvie has run off with another inmate, her boyfriend. There’s already a note of panic in the house when the lost “camper” appears at the door and pleads to spend the night. Jonah is an insomniac and increasingly unstable; he seizes Carl’s gun, ties him to a chair, and precedes to get to “know” the couple intimately because that’s what the Lord (and Sylvie, his girlfriend) tells him to do. The tale grows increasingly deranged as Jonah fixates on Carl’s concentration-camp tattoo, and a whole graphic saga of his true Gypsy identity and horrific escape from Birkenau is wrenchingly revealed. Safety seems key to the novel—the safety of feeling loved and sheltered, the safety of hiding behind weakness, and the safety of inventing pretty stories to make a life more palatable. All of which Thayer challenges admirably, but her determined aim to shock through violence borders on the gratuitous. She has a maddeningly deliberative style (“I gather bones of dead animals,” says Jessie. “Why? I don’t know”), which is effective in building suspense, but Jessie’s final cold-blooded act seems almost tit-for-tat, making her story as significant as Carl’s.
A tale told in chilling crescendo.Pub Date: March 18, 2005
ISBN: 1-56512-444-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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