LaCorte delves deeply into horrible things that humans do—and, as in life, not all evil is punished—but still offers hope...
A fake psychic wakes up to find that her abilities are real in LaCorte’s debut thriller.
Claire is descended from a line of female psychics, but she’s never truly had the gift. In fact, she feels like she’s faking it in many aspects of her life: her job, her relationship, and her family. Her father suffered a series of strokes when Claire was in high school, and the subsequent distance that sprang up between her and her mother has left her unwilling to open herself up to love. When her father suffers yet another stroke and then dies, however, and she returns to Pennsylvania, she and her mother finally begin to speak honestly with one another, opening up all the parts of Claire she had been keeping locked down. Flying home to Sedona after the funeral, she not only finds new fulfillment with and commitment to her boyfriend, but she also begins to manifest a true psychic gift in her readings for others. When Rena, a blowsy woman she met on the plane, comes for a reading, Claire knows that something is wrong. Rena’s daughter, Stephanie, is terribly sick, but her illness, which has mystified every doctor she’s seen, may have a darker, deeper cause. Claire finds herself in a race against time to save the little girl. LaCorte splits the narration between Claire and Rena, alternating chapters, and she truly does create two very distinct and believable voices, a difficult feat. It’s easy to be sympathetic to Claire, while Rena seems immediately to be an unreliable narrator, but the voices complement each other, building two sides of the story that officially intertwine about halfway through. At the heart of this novel is Claire’s realization that love, “a desperate, life-sustaining, and imperative connection,” can also be “pure and light and joyful.” Make no mistake: This is a dark, dark thriller, and the villain is absolute. But alternating voices allow for a more nuanced building of tension as LaCorte contrasts this darkness to Claire's own fragile optimism.
LaCorte delves deeply into horrible things that humans do—and, as in life, not all evil is punished—but still offers hope and healing in the end.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-290607-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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
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