by Darrell Tooker ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 11, 2013
Quite the page-turner, despite its imperfections.
In this debut supernatural thriller, a young woman is abducted and forced to live in a secret community run by immortals.
As teenagers in Framingham, Conn., Laura and Bobby once broke into the abandoned—and supposedly haunted—McPherson house. While exploring, a raspy voice said, “LAURA, I WANT YOUR FIRSTBORN!” Now a college student, Laura is seven months pregnant and happily married to Bobby. Everything has been proceeding smoothly, until, while in the bathtub, she hears the same raspy voice from her youth. Confronting the strangeness, Laura revisits the McPherson property. This time, however, she can’t leave after exploring: A mysterious force prevents her exit. In the kitchen closet, she finds a hidden tunnel with a lever inside, but when she pulls it, she loses consciousness only to awake in a system of caves. Once outside, she meets a man named Thomas, who walks her to the village of Hanrahan. She learns that this farming community (which exists outside the real world) is governed by the Lords of Hanrahan, siblings whom God has granted immortality for their good deeds back the 19th century. Tragically, Laura also learns that she, a pregnant woman, has been permanently “transferred” to Hanrahan to help serve the community. Nevertheless, she prays for the determination to escape. First-time author Tooker pulls readers deep into his realm with clean, inviting prose. Narrative tension then builds incredibly, as a chilling atmosphere surrounds Laura. “Nobody from your world can come here unless they are summoned,” Thomas tells her. Bobby and the Framingham police are portrayed effectively in their desperate search for her. Occasionally, however, tenses in the story can hiccup; for example, “He liked her as soon as he met her, and now he has much admiration for her.” More frustrating is that in the cultish land of Hanrahan, the Lords aren’t condemned as evil or insane, even though their “summoning” of pregnant women shatters families. As the tale wraps up, there’s a bewildering lack of outrage from the characters; instead, there’s an emphasis on the power of prayer.
Quite the page-turner, despite its imperfections.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491707999
Page Count: 364
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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