A desperate victim of a hit-and-run scrambles to uncover lost memories and long-buried secrets in this mystery/thriller.
Wong, who previously wrote the novel Swearing Off Stars (2017), hones her craft in a tale of identity, loss, and finding oneself anew. Veronica “Vonny” Kwan wakes up in a small-town Nevada hospital in what she believes to be 2013. She claims to be a recent graduate of New York University and is looking toward a bright future with her best friend, Abby Knowles,at her side. However, sympathetic nurses throw Vonny’s world off its axis when they inform her that it’s 2022, her married name is Veronica Lewis, and she hasn’t spoken to Abby in years. Abby claims that she never wants to speak to Vonny again. When two detectives inform Vonny that her husband, whom she can’t remember, has been murdered and the culprit is still at large, she feels completely lost. Living alone in a towering San Francisco mansion, she has strange dreams (“I am running along a sinuous trail, sweat dripping down both legs and mud caked around my ankles”). As she strives to find out what became of her spouse, she must also solve the mystery of what became of who she used to be. Over the course of this novel, Vonny’s story moves at a quick, graceful pace in confident prose. The use of flashbacks is succinct and will have the effect of keeping readers wholly invested in a fictional world that’s full of twists and subtle clues. Although many of the manipulative villains and well-intentioned allies feel like recognizable types, they are varied and well developed. The author excels at providing clever quips and specific, vivid imagery, which makes for a memorable and enticing read.
A well-paced puzzler that readers will want to finish in one sitting.Pub Date: June 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-948051-96-5
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Red Adept Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
72
GET IT
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. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Ten years after having discovered her Oxford roommate’s dead body in front of the fireplace in their room, a young woman struggles with the realization that she may have helped send the wrong man to prison.
Hannah Jones arrives at Oxford hardly believing that she’s been accepted into this haven of learning and wealth. Sharing a picturesque set of rooms with the flamboyant and beautiful April Clarke-Cliveden, she divides her time between rigorous studying and energetic socializing with Emily Lippmana, Ryan Coates, Hugh Bland, and Will de Chastaigne, with whom she shares an attraction even though he's April’s boyfriend. It’s a good life except for the increasingly creepy interactions she has with John Neville, one of the porters. When Hannah finds April dead one night just after she’s seen Neville coming down the stairs from their rooms, it’s her testimony that puts him in jail. Ware divides the novel into alternating “before” and “after” chapters, with the narrative of Hannah’s college experience unfolding parallel to the events of her life nearly a decade later, when she’s married to Will and pregnant with their first child. Then Neville dies in prison and Hannah hears from a reporter who thinks he might actually have been innocent. Hannah begins to wonder herself, and she plunges back into the past to see if she can figure out what really happened that night. As usual with Ware, the novel is well crafted—the setting, characters, and dialogue are all engaging—but it lacks the author's signature sense of urgent and imminent threat. The novel unfolds smoothly, providing a few twists and turns, as the reader might expect, but not really delivering any true suspense. It also lacks the contrast between a luxurious background and the characters’ fears that Ware has often played to great effect. She does offer a deeper dive into the trauma of the survivors than she usually does, but this isn't the breathless page-turner one has come to expect from Ware.
Delightfully readable fiction, but the mystery disappoints.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9821-5526-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
Categories: SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION
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