by Derik Cavignano ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A gleefully hard-boiled urban fantasy that lights up Boston’s mean streets.
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From the author of Where the Dark One Sleeps (2002) comes the story of an accountant who’s drawn into the clutches of a cult bent on reshaping the world.
In Boston, accountant Jacob Hanley is about to enjoy a restaurant meal when an old man stumbles in. Jacob catches the flailing man and is told to “Beware the Order,” the “plane of Symbios” and “the Great Elder.” Rattled as the man dies, Jacob assumes the ordeal is another of God’s sick pranks, like when his wife, Megan, died from a sudden aneurysm over a year ago. Later, Jacob realizes that he absentmindedly picked up a stranger’s ID from his table in the restaurant, and the 30-year-old stranger—Charles J. Riggs III—has the same piercing eyes as the old man. Jacob’s brother Ray, a police detective, agrees to investigate and learns that the old man was in fact Charles Riggs, a microbiologist who worked for Symbios Innovations. After muggers snatch Riggs’ ID, Jacob can’t resist checking out Riggs’ residence. He finds a computer document named SX4 and emails it to himself. From there, the accountant falls deeper into the deadly realm of an age-defying cult run by the powerful Great Elder. Author Cavignano brings wonderful characterization of people and places to his lightning-paced fantasy thriller. Jacob is a sympathetic widower who’s cut himself off from friends; he’d be totally lost without family. Boston neighborhoods are impeccably portrayed, like the North End’s “white-haired old men sitting in folding chairs outside tiny groceries.” There’s some enjoyable sci-fi, too, as with the Great Elder’s intelligence-enhancing formula that creates “an explosion of glial cells to support a host of new neurons.” But when readers finally encounter the menacing phenomena at the heart of the narrative, they may feel shortchanged. Religion and environmentalism also have a strong presence in the adventure, yet the goons-and-guns elements overshadow them; perhaps a sequel will explore the heavier topics more fully. Cavignano’s overall execution is nevertheless quite entertaining.
A gleefully hard-boiled urban fantasy that lights up Boston’s mean streets.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2018
A tour de force.
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New York Times Bestseller
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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