A British screenwriter relocates to New England and becomes embroiled in small-town life in this novel.
Bill, a British writer, his wife, Catherine, and his son, Daniel, are living in France when opportunity comes knocking. Bill gets an offer to script an American TV series and double his current salary. He uproots his wife and son, installing them in a postwar timber house in the backwater town of Broadacre in New England, where he feels he will find all the tranquility he needs to focus on his craft. From his very arrival, the town appears to have other ideas. No sooner has the family stepped through the front door of its new home than it is disturbed by new neighbors coming by to introduce themselves and invite the clan to a party. Mary-Lou, the family discovers, is an overly flirtatious lawyer, and her husband Tom’s a broad-shouldered, lascivious builder. Soon Bill and Catherine find themselves caught in the unnecessary tangles of a small-town existence. They discover that there is a dispute regarding a shed built on their land. Their house is coveted. A property developer’s covert plan to build a working model village threatens the status quo. And what are all the mysterious goings on in the cemetery? And then come the murders. This book is intriguing, embellished by Crutchley’s (The Black Carriage, 2015) admirably quirky descriptive style: “The falling sun is painting the landscape as routinely as people go to church, as they dance in strange straight lines, obey their absurd speed limits, and as the weather is guaranteed to fall apart straight after Labor Day.” The charming work’s one flaw is that it takes on an ambitiously long list of characters, including crooks, state troopers, priests, and rabbis, which the author struggles to handle. It is not uncommon for a reader to have to backtrack to ascertain who is who and who does what. This is because Crutchley fails to draw sufficiently distinct portraits, to the extent that they become an anodyne blur. It is then necessary to reread passages to distinguish, among others, Tom the builder from Josh the “nose straightener.” But this minor confusion distracts little from an engaging and thoughtfully conceived plot. A family deals with a sleepy Northern town’s secrets in this enjoyably energetic romp.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 258
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 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.
