Solid details flesh out a nicely complicated plot.
When an ER doctor’s former fiancée is murdered, the blood evidence implicates either him or his long-missing, drug-addict identical twin.
Ben Dafoe knows crime scenes. A consultant for the Seattle police, he has befriended the cops he has helped. But his life has a darker side: Both his former fiancée, the beautiful Emily, and his twin, Aaron, lost their lives to cocaine and meth. Aaron’s body was never found, but the copious blood soaking a torched car has led the police to believe he was the victim of a drug-related homicide. Emily’s murder, a vicious stabbing death alongside that of a known dealer, seems to imply another drug killing. While Ben is saddened, he’s not completely surprised: Emily had claimed to be clean, but had a history of relapsing. However, when a midnight telephone caller whispers to Ben that his blood will be found at the scene, the picture becomes more complicated. Only his dead twin would have his exact DNA. So is Ben being framed? Or could his missing brother be alive? Because Ben knows how investigations proceed, it almost seems reasonable that he lights out to Vancouver to track down the source of the mysterious calls, the killer and possibly the brother he had thought long gone. With his background as an emergency-room physician, Kalla (Rage Therapy, 2006, etc.) gets the details right. The addled sleeplessness endemic to ER staff, the adrenaline rush of saving—or losing—a life and the split-second decisions that become commonplace all play into his hero’s questionable acts. Add in several romantic complications, tying together Emily’s past and the straying husband of Ben’s sexy colleague, Alex, and Kalla has the ingredients for a heated thriller. Flashbacks to Ben’s final encounter with Emily provide more clues, and despite the limitations of the occasionally clunky first-person narration, this thriller bounces along at a good pace.
Solid details flesh out a nicely complicated plot.Pub Date: June 12, 2007
ISBN: 0-765-31832-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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