Boston gets gory in this enjoyable, horror-tinged crime tale.
A thriller puts Boston cops on the trail of a twisted serial killer.
In downtown Boston, Detective Ray Hanley has just left a courtroom and intends to meet his brother, Jacob, for a charity golf tournament. But his phone rings and his partner, Billy Devlin, calls him to the Granite Rail Quarries to investigate a death. The body fished from a quarry is Danny “the Mule” McDougal. Danny’s genitals and face have been creatively mutilated, and the detectives realize that this grisly, insulting death probably isn’t the work of either the Giabatti or Flaherty crime families. The killer, calling himself the Artist, kidnaps people who have wronged him, then tortures and mutilates them to death. The next victim, art gallery owner Barry Finkleton, ends up on display in the Stony Brook Reservation, hanging from a tree with crafted spider legs stuck where his own limbs used to be. Meanwhile, Jack Flaherty, the Irish mob boss, says that “the truce is over” between him and Italian kingpin Sal Giabatti. As Boston starts to resemble the bullet-riddled Old West, Ray grows more comfortable around his ex-girlfriend Tina Bolton, who works in the medical examiner’s office. The collision of his personal and professional lives may rock the entire city. In this second thriller starring the Hanley brothers, Cavignano (The Righteous and the Wicked, 2014, etc.) juxtaposes Clive Barker-style horror with Boston neighborhoods like Southie and oddities such as the “bright orange Tyrannosaurus Rex” on Route 1. The Artist’s behavior is gag-inducing and includes feeding his victims slices of one another and raping them. Relief comes during scenes of domestic bliss in Charlestown, where Ray and his wife raise three children. Elsewhere, the tone is macho but campy, especially Billy’s dialogue (“When life gives you melons, you gotta squeeze them while they’re ripe”). Overall, the author cracks his whip over the narrative, pushing the Flaherty family and the Artist under a single, villainous spotlight. Readers fatigued by bloated series may appreciate this. Then again, Cavignano’s vibrant imagination might flourish in a decompressed, multibook storyline. Here, though, his breakneck pacing consistently entertains.
Boston gets gory in this enjoyable, horror-tinged crime tale.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 427
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
