An original, but uneven technology thriller involving murder and a mysterious manipulator.
An obsessed stalker shadows a young man as his Internet company prepares to go public in the year 2000.
Frahmann (The Finnish Girl, 2014, etc.) tells the story of Danny Lahti, an innocent young man from the small town of Thread, Wisconsin. As the novel opens on New Year’s Eve 2000, Danny is happily ensconced in Los Angeles with his older boyfriend, Josh Gunderson. They are joint partners in an Internet venture called Premios, but Danny is mostly content to leave the running of the business to Josh and his right-hand woman, Orleans. But as Josh prepares to take the company public, some strange events start to plague the couple. Someone hacks into the company’s files. There is a break-in at Josh and Danny’s California basement. And when friend and investor Chip Grant flies to LA to investigate, he mysteriously disappears and is later found dead. As Danny, with the help of Chip’s wife, Cynthia, tries to uncover the truth, he keeps running into more and more questions. Is Josh really as innocent as he claims about the financial health of the company? Why do figures from Danny’s past keep resurfacing as he investigates? And who is the enigmatic stalker who seems to be following Danny around town? Frahmann certainly weaves an original story here as he brings readers along on Danny’s journey. Yet, ultimately, the plot feels both overly complicated and a bit thin. The schemes and machinations involving Premios are a little too convoluted to follow. The revelation of Danny’s stalker is both predictable and baffling—it seems difficult to believe that one character has been following Danny and secretly meddling in his life for years. Despite consistently repeating lines like “I’ve always wanted to tear away everything until we face ourselves in abject nakedness, unable to hide behind anything but our essence,” the stalker and his actual motives remain somewhat opaque. Focusing on character development instead of shocks and thrills would have helped make the novel a bit more emotionally accessible for readers.
An original, but uneven technology thriller involving murder and a mysterious manipulator.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-71057-9
Page Count: 327
Publisher: Loon Town Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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