A shocking but satisfying ending caps off this taut tale of murder among the privileged.
A moment of triumph turns into terror in this dark thriller.
Claudia Atkins O’Sheil is about to enter what should be a celebration. A forensic examiner, she’s created a method of blood-spatter analysis that’s a huge success, boosting not only her reputation but that of her mentor and boss, Lord Philip Ardmore. The party at the Royal College of Forensic Scientists in London is meant to praise her, but she’s quaking with fear because she intends to reveal a secret that will destroy everything. Flashback to a similar party exactly a year ago. She was reeling then, too, still reacting to the recent, sudden death of her beloved husband, James, a lawyer. She was struggling to raise their two teenage sons alone, but at least her career had taken a turn for the better. That gala is interrupted, though, when she and Philip are called to the scene of a gruesome double murder. It isn’t so Claudia can evaluate the blood spatter (although she does)—it’s because one of the victims was one of Philip’s oldest friends. Jonty Stewart and his much younger fiancée, Francesca Emmanuel, had been stabbed to death, and their trained guard dog had been shot. Everything points to the murder being personal, not random, and in short order there’s an arrest. But Claudia isn’t convinced, and she can’t help investigating, even though it’s not her job. Charlie Taunton, James’ colleague and friend, gently warns her off as he tries to renew his on-again, off-again (and not always healthy) relationship with Claudia’s sister, Gina. An addict who’s sober at the moment, Gina is living with Claudia and helping with the boys, but she’s always been a loose cannon. Mina has long been adept at suspenseful pacing and at creating flawed but engaging characters, and here she paints Claudia as something of an anthropologist—a Glasgow native, she’s constantly trying to interpret the codes and hierarchies of the English upper classes. As her search for the killer intensifies, it both expands into other dark doings and draws alarmingly close to home.
A shocking but satisfying ending caps off this taut tale of murder among the privileged.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780316243049
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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