Next book

THE CITY

Koontz offers a passable modern fairy tale about good and evil, love and loyalty.

Koontz (Innocence, 2013, etc.) genre-bends the metaphysical into a coming-of-age story, one measuring love’s parameters.

Honoring his racial and musical heritage, young Jonah bears seven middle names in homage to the African-American greats of swing music. He's the son of Sylvia Bledsoe Kirk, a singer gifted enough to have won scholarships, and Tilton Kirk, a rogue smooth enough to get Sylvia pregnant before she could get to college.There’s an off-again, on-again marriage, Tilton fantasizing about celebrity chef-dom and Sylvia working at Woolworths and singing in nightclubs. The most constant presence in Jonah’s life is grandfather Teddy Bledsoe, "a piano man," a big band veteran now working as a lounge pianist. The Beatles rock radio and records, but preteen Jonah is entranced with big band music, and he’s a gifted pianist. The narrative covers the '60s shake-ups, including opposition to the Vietnam War. Tilton’s skirt-chasing ensnares him in a bomb plot by two psychopaths posing as political agitators, putting Jonah and Sylvia in great danger. Koontz writes Sylvia and Teddy as too good to be true, and Jonah’s too-wise childhood perspective seems overly influenced by Jonah-the-adult’s narration. There are, nevertheless, affecting supporting characters, like the reclusive Mr. Yoshioka, once a Manzanar internee. The cardboard-cutout antagonists are not fully formed, but Koontz’s exploration of the Bledsoes' familial bond gives the story heart. The action is predictable and less interesting than Koontz’s discourses on swing music and his allusions to art, race and social mores. Koontz displays his usual gift for phrase-making—"moments when buildings and bridges, all of it, seemed like an illusion projected on a screen of rain." The setting is New York City, but the great metropolis plays no real part in the narrative other than its metaphysical manifestation in the form of "Miss Pearl," an amorphous character appearing at critical junctures like Cinderella’s fairy godmother.  

Koontz offers a passable modern fairy tale about good and evil, love and loyalty.

Pub Date: July 1, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-345-54593-0

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Bantam

Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014

Next book

THEN SHE WAS GONE

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 29


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

Next book

THE A LIST

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 29


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.

Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.

Pub Date: April 2, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Close Quickview