An often thrilling speculative tale that will keep readers engaged.
In Engstrom’s post-apocalyptic horror novel, a young teen tries to protect his sister in a dangerous world.
Parker Montrose has no one left but his sister, Sherilyn. A rapid, flulike pandemic swept through the world, and their parents were among the many millionsof victims. Unable to speak, due to a fever he had as a baby,Parker relies on his sister to be his voice, but as the older brother, he feels that it’s his job to keep her safe and make sure she has enough to eat. However, he doesn’t want to raid the houses of his dead and rotting neighbors for supplies, so he and his sibling take an offer of shelter from a stranger in their small community. Parker and Sherilyn’s hope for a new home turns out to be a place run by a dictator calling himself Reverend Elijah, a run-down used car salesman with a god complex. Parker’s unwillingness to follow Elijah’s rules leads to him and Sherilyn being banished from the group—but not before Parker hears about another community that actually takes care of its people. While searching for it, Parker learns about an ability he never knew he had, and one he doesn’t understand—it appears that when he’s in the presence of death, he’s able to speak. Engstrom offers an after-the-end tale that feels painfully relevant to today’s situation, and it’s one that’s unusually hopeful for the subgenre. The novel moves at a quick pace with no filler. Sections are clearly broken up into months, and, by the end, the many elements of the story come together as a cohesive whole. That said, the cast of characters eventually becomes numerous, requiring the reader pay close attention to the identities and community roles of minor players. This can get mildly overwhelming at times, but it does help to flesh out the novel and allows for fruitful comparisons. Despite the overall dark tone, the book does have an uplifting message that will leave readers feeling satisfied.
An often thrilling speculative tale that will keep readers engaged.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73429-789-8
Page Count: 236
Publisher: IFD Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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