A riveting page-turner starring prehistoric beasts; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World in California.
Set in Yosemite National Park, this fusion of horror, SF, and mainstream thriller involves the discovery of a pack of prehistoric predators believed to be extinct for more than 10,000 years.
After a hiker disappears in Yosemite’s high country, chief park ranger Axten Raymond and his fiancee, Petra Stahl, a world-class rock climber and manager of a nearby camp, set out to find the man. Forced to deal with a significant earthquake—whose epicenter is just 40 miles away—and its aftershocks as well as a looming threat from a group of anti-government militiamen bent on “reclaiming” the park, Raymond and Stahl soon discover the missing hiker is just a precursor to a much larger problem. A pack of dire wolves, existing in a massive subterranean cave system for millennia, has been freed after the earthquake created a new opening. The formidable alpha wolf—“the size of a healthy tiger”—has a grotesque head, “with a blunt, unwolf-like muzzle, and oversize bat-like ears that sit on a lowbrowed, flat head. The animal’s eyes are a sickening pale yellow, bordering on albino, huge, the size of quahogs.” Powered by dark imagery (a mountain peak resembles a “gothic castle in a child’s fable,” and wind whips around a cabin like a “legion of angry harpies”) that complements the narrative’s brutal and bloody tone perfectly, O’Neill’s tale savvily alters the point of view throughout. The story subtly switches from third person to first and second person in places, making the reading experience more emotionally connective and immersive. Examples include: “All we see, at first, are canine-like legs, but larger, thick set, chunked with muscles,” and “You can almost hear the snow melting.” But arguably the tale’s biggest strength lies in the sheer amount of breathtaking, heart-stopping action and adventure, which creates a relentlessly paced, adrenaline-inducing thrill ride that will have readers on the edges of their seats until the very end.
A riveting page-turner starring prehistoric beasts; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World in California.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2022
ISBN: 9781638779322
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Off the Common Books
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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