Secret drug trials, back-stabbings, and unnatural death: fundamentals for an electrifying tale.
The Center for Aesthetics in California hopes to introduce a drug that can cure post-surgical patients’ neuroses, but it’s a murder that sends doctors into a tailspin in Dafoe’s debut thriller.
Surgeon Dr. Duncan Gates believes his career is over before it has started when, on the way to his first job, he’s in a car accident that leaves him scarred and with double vision. But he’s given another chance thanks to Dr. Gunther Mendoza, whose new center just opened its doors. Dr. M, a plastic surgeon, is fed up with patients who can’t adjust psychologically after cosmetic surgery. He aspires to reverse this negative mental state with a not-quite–Food and Drug Administration–approved drug, Nepenthe, courtesy of neuropharmacologist Dr. Neelaka Oghob. Drs. M and Oghob secretly test Nepenthe, which wipes out bad memories, and bring in Willie Jefferson as a test subject. Willie’s a convicted serial killer who served only nine months of a life sentence, but if Nepenthe’s viable, it’ll turn him into a productive citizen. The drug has to succeed, especially because Sen. Helen Selkirk’s already beefing up her re-election campaign by teasing a “pharma-correction” program. But all plans for Nepenthe may go awry when a body turns up at the center. Sure, Willie’s the go-to suspect, but no one, including Duncan, has a solid alibi, and anyone could be capable of murder. The author guarantees intrigue in his soap-opera plot with an opening scene at the morgue. Readers learn that the victim’s female, but the story doesn’t reveal who she is until much later. Enthralling character relationships in the tale abound. Duncan, for one, romances free-spirited dance therapist Beni Romano, whose reserved identical twin, Anna, is a psychiatrist; a surgeon at the center, Dr. Darrell Jefferson, is Willie’s brother. The murderer, too, is not initially apparent, with varying opportunities and motives among numerous suspects. Dafoe’s narrative remains generally easygoing, in keeping with the animated plot; the sisters’ constant bickering is a highlight, at one point even resulting in a hair-pulling scuffle. But he shrewdly addresses serious issues, like whether rehabilitating a criminal is possible or whether the adverse reactions to a grim recollection can ever truly disappear.
Secret drug trials, back-stabbings, and unnatural death: fundamentals for an electrifying tale.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 423
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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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