An overwhelming anti-abortion political agenda and heavy-handed metaphors mar this genuinely scary premise.
A debut mixed-genre novel about rape and unplanned pregnancies in which horror and suspense meet a political treatise.
At a gazebo in a park, a psychotic rapist viciously attacks teenagers Maria and Juan. He kills Juan and violently rapes the virginal Maria, ending the attack by slashing her face and impaling her with a knife, leaving her near death. Maria survives but her life is destroyed, deprived of her dreams of marriage and motherhood; a pregnancy would probably kill her. Maria wonders if it would have been better had she had died in the attack—a wish complicated by the realization that her unidentified rapist impregnated her. She procures abortifacient pills from a sympathetic Mexican pharmacist and attempts suicide before leaving town. In a new city, she befriends Kat, a young woman who has had a disturbing hookup with Tio, a colleague who works in the employee relations department of her company. Although the encounter was initially consensual, he became violent, choking her and leaving her with many bruises and a fertilized egg. Apparently, Tio constantly seduces women and demands that if they become pregnant, they have abortions. He’s a psychopath and serial rapist, though that doesn’t seem to hinder his ability to maintain a responsible managerial job while eluding all law enforcement. But, according to certain characters, terminating a pregnancy is worse than that: “In deciding to abort—to kill your baby, you have committed a sin more grievous than that of the rapist,” a priest tells Maria. Elsewhere, Thompson depicts certain procedures with an uncomfortable level of detail: “[T]hey’d use forceps to pull the baby—except for its head—out of my body. Then they’d stab a hole at the base of its skull and suck its brains out until the head collapses.” The implausible plot is unfortunate, because the author is able to generate real fear. Tio’s diabolical mind and his ability to exert control from his position in the company are terrifying. Without the anti-choice diatribes this might have been a successful thriller.
An overwhelming anti-abortion political agenda and heavy-handed metaphors mar this genuinely scary premise.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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