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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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