A perceptive, no-nonsense dramatization of a crucial and timely topic.
When a female TV producer’s documentary on battered women becomes an exposé of a particular shelter, male studio executives threaten her livelihood in this debut novel.
Years ago, Julianne Sloan left behind a chance at news management and moved to TV programming. Now a producer of Chicago Sizzle, she oversees a staff developing public affairs stories. Since segment producer Tina Beyers is out with the flu, Julianne takes over her story on Horizons, a newly opened shelter for women and their children. One of Horizons’ residents is Elisa Adams, who endured years of abuse from her husband, Peter. She finally made the decision to leave when the couple’s 10-year-old daughter, Kelly, became a victim of Peter’s anger and violence. Julianne interviews women at the shelter, but an even more important story may start with Elisa. Someone at Horizons is ensuring that it’s not a safe haven for Elisa and Kelly—or the other residents. Sadly, Julianne’s plan to expose what’s happening there is met with resistance from her bosses, chiefly Ted Marshall, since evidently the TV studio’s owners helped build the shelter. Determined to finish her documentary and help other abuse sufferers, Julianne quickly realizes that it may come at the expense of her career. Harrison’s absorbing and timely novel shrewdly tackles issues of abuse, which comes in all sorts of ugly colors, including coercion. The danger suggested by the title generally applies to characters other than the protagonist: Elisa is escaping an abusive marriage, while Tina goes undercover at Horizons. But Julianne is oppressed by domineering men at the workplace, a struggle that’s just as potent and relevant. The author deftly balances her narrative with a few respectable males, including cameraman Jake Rossi, Julianne’s confidant and romantic interest (though his current marriage presents a hurdle). But while scene details are clear and precise, lengthy dialogue lessens the impact of fervent remarks. Julianne’s warning to Ted—“I’m fiery enough to bring you up on charges and nasty enough to create a scandal”—is powerful without its accompanying lines, ending with “If I were you, I’d cut my losses and get the hell away from me now.”
A perceptive, no-nonsense dramatization of a crucial and timely topic.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-2474-0
Page Count: 284
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 14, 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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© 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.
