While portions of this tale are overly detailed, supernatural surprises abound.
A debut thriller focuses on a legendary haunted house in London.
Readers are told at the outset that the house at 50 Berkeley Square has a reputation for being haunted. It has also been the site of “a number of grizzly deaths.” One of those deaths occurs in the present day when a young woman named Maria Holden winds up leaping from the building. Maria’s death draws the attention of a man in his 20s named Jim Cartwright. Jim works in the accounts department at the London International Gazette, though his dream is to become a reporter. He manages to take quite a few pictures of the horrendous scene with his iPhone before fleeing into the night and making a commitment to investigate 50 Berkeley Square. Jim’s probe is interwoven with macabre scenes from the house’s past. There is, for instance, a man in 1789 who goes mad and has to be confined to the attic. And in 1840, an aristocrat named Sir Robert Warboys accepts a foolish wager requiring him to spend a night in the house. But the pressing issue is Jim and his mission to get to the bottom of what’s happening at the infamous landmark. Will his curiosity lead him to become one of the house’s victims? In order to answer that question, the plot explores many incidents, some of which are more exciting than others. McCran’s setup to Sir Robert’s bet is a lengthy journey and includes the hefty statement that “Sir Robert poisoned the air with a contaminating decadence that crushed the spirit of those who really did not like him!” But while aspects of the house’s history sometimes slow the tale down, they are incorporated in such a way as to make readers feel that they, like Jim, are discovering bits and pieces of an enthralling and bizarre past. After all, 50 Berkeley Square is a real London address with a connection to spirits. But even readers familiar with the dwelling should find that there is much captivating material to uncover here. Those who think a story based on an old house can’t include sex, drugs, and a glimpse at a futuristic London will, by the end, need to reconsider their assumptions.
While portions of this tale are overly detailed, supernatural surprises abound.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 323
Publisher: PartridgeAfrica
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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