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THE GRAVITY OF SHADOWS

Scattered, amateurish thriller featuring an art dealer-as-sleuth poking around the mansions of Palm Beach society, by a former art dealer and heroin addict. Ramus’ second effort (Thief of Light, 1995) begins with a deceptive semblance of storytelling craft, introducing debt-dogged art dealer Wil Sumner as he helps an elderly couple sell an heirloom painting at auction. Immediately afterward, Sumner is mysteriously summoned to Palm Beach by Broward Gaines, attorney for bedridden multimillionaire Andrew Stevenson, who wants his collection of drawings appraised for sale. A poor boy who grew up serving the cabanas of Palm Beach society, Wil arrives to witness a harassing stranger being driven off by Maj, the black groundskeeper, and soon teams up with the de rigeur poolside blond in the bikini—Stevenson’s daughter, M.K.—to try to figure out why Andrew is selling what turns out to be a fabulous collection. Wil ends up fighting a lethal intruder who breaks in and demands “the file” from a medicated Andrew. In the bedside battle, the thug kills M.K.’s mother and flees, leaving the police to suspect Wil of her murder. By listening at keyholes, Wil figures out the mystery: Florida’s Spanish-born gubernatorial candidate, Roberto Salgo, is a former Falangist from the Spanish Civil War, one of Franco’s nasty young terrorists. After comatose Andrew wakes up, he confesses to Wil that, when he was a young schoolboy living in Spain, he went along with Roberto the night the gang torched a church and killed three nuns. It was his remorseful attempt to force Salgo to withdraw his candidacy by threatening to reveal his secret that has caused all the trouble. By now, of course, Salgo’s men have kidnaped M.K., leaving Wil and Maj to track down and rescue her in a bloody gun battle. A flaccid pudding that mushes together serious issues with outtakes from Baywatch and Miami Vice, although the art history details and Palm Beach milieu ring true.

Pub Date: May 15, 1998

ISBN: 0-06-018779-4

Page Count: 304

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998

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DEVOLUTION

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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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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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