A strong series entry with all of the elements of a classic street-crime novel.
Metcalfe’s coming-of-age tale follows a group of high school friends and gang members in 1970s New York City.
Readers meet Johnny Álvarez at the tail-end of an unspeakably difficult childhood. Coming from an abusive home, it is no surprise that he has fallen into small-time drug running. Together with his group of friends, including Jarrod (whose living room reeks of “cheap gin and Pall Malls”), Clyde, Chico, Mario, and a bevy of others (totaling 16 high school students and one 19-year-old), Johnny does pickup “runs” collecting large amounts of marijuana and cocaine for a local dealer, The Brick. Johnny’s gang (they call themselves the “Dogs of War”) are only bit players in the game at this point, but Johnny is looking to move up in the ranks. In addition to the allure of more cash, several of the Dogs of War, including Johnny, face tenuous housing situations and hope to pool the gang’s money to renovate a worn-down warehouse in which they can all live. Much of their gang activity is relegated to graffiti-tagging the most exotic spots they can find, and while on their way to an old tunnel, they run into an older, more experienced gang, Dos Cruces, known for their double-cross emblem. Though the DC crew lets them go, now the Dogs are on their radar, and Johnny discovers in short time that that’s not somewhere you want to be. The stakes increase quickly in Metcalfe’s novel (the second in a series), and the prose keeps pace, escalating from calm to panic with bracing speed: “As Johnny stood on the sidelines, watching the remaining members take practice shots, a dozen men jogged up from the subway station. They spread out around the court, fingers hooked in the chain-link fence. The double cross emblem was evident, stitched on clothing and tattooed on exposed skin.” The author renders the New York City setting with grit and authority, making for a swift, satisfying read.
A strong series entry with all of the elements of a classic street-crime novel.Pub Date: July 30, 2025
ISBN: 9781962834483
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Calumet Editions
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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