A first-rate cast drives this brisk, exhilarating action tale.
A single mother leads a high-speed chase in order to save her teen daughter in this thriller.
California real estate agent Stephanie Power is making time for her daughter. While her ex-husband drags out an ugly custody dispute, Stephanie takes 16-year-old Libby on a Texas road trip in their brand-new RV. Unfortunately, trouble lurks, as Libby and the RV vanish at a gas station. The kidnapper calls Stephanie with a bizarre order—drive a BMW north with the gas pedal floored. The caller, German Ilsa Bakke, is hot off an armored-car heist. Though she and her crew separated, Ilsa has the loot and wants Stephanie to distract the cops pursuing the getaway car. She tells Stephanie: “If you stop for any reason, kid dies. If you crash, kid dies. If the cops catch you, kid dies. If you make it for one hour you will see your kid again. Clear?” The police are no help, convinced that the woman behind the BMW’s wheel is the robber. But Stephanie’s boyfriend, Dan Crockett, does what he can as he watches TV news coverage of the chase. Things get even more complicated when members of the still-at-large heist crew join the pursuit to get their hands on the stolen goods. Red’s kinetic story hits the ground running, opening with the mother and daughter on the road and accelerating quickly with Libby in peril. Copious flashbacks follow, including scenes of Stephanie’s failed marriage and the robbers plotting the heist, but these brief subplots hardly affect the narrative momentum. Red, who’s written or co-written such classic horror films as The Hitcher and Near Dark, specializes in scene-stealing baddies. Ilsa is no exception; just when she seems sympathetic, her sadistic, possibly psychotic side reveals itself. Stephanie is equally indelible, utilizing skills she’s picked up from her Hollywood stuntman father. While the story offers few surprises, readers will bask in the taut action scenes and blistering final act. There’s dark humor as well, such as two wounded guys from the heist strolling into a CVS for painkillers.
A first-rate cast drives this brisk, exhilarating action tale.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-3-9603460-3-6
Page Count: 297
Publisher: Editions Moustache
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2022
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
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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