by Erik Dean ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 2022
A thrilling ride that hits a few speed bumps along the way.
An Arizona dust storm hides an evil secret in this roadside horror novel.
A highway—a stretch of road between Tucson and Phoenix—becomes the epicenter of a treacherous dust storm in the Sonoran Desert. As the wind picks up sand, pebbles, and small rocks, highway patrolman Richard Hickman works to maintain traffic safety. In a dust storm, there’s poor visibility, “causing a lot of accidents,” Richard warns as he encourages travelers to exit the highway or pull over before the tempest arrives. But this storm harbors a nasty secret: Hiding in the fine particles whipping through the air is a malevolent presence that leaves in its wake untold chaos and destruction. When travelers start dying or disappearing in the clouds of dust, the rumors and legends of evil spirits that possess sandstorms begin to hold more credence. Are there devils in the dust? This question hovers over each of the characters trapped on the highway in Dean’s engaging tale. The story follows a vast array of players, with each chapter focusing on one group, describing how the characters got to the highway and providing a little context to their relationships before disaster strikes. There are Mike and Ruth, a couple on a date in his stylish Firebird Formula. There’s also the Lopez household, traveling on the highway for a close-to-home family outing. Though these characters and chapters seem disparate, when the storm comes, the book’s stories suddenly start overlapping in a gripping multicar pileup. Unfortunately, the novel’s developments before the tempest mute some of the tension. Readers always know where the characters are going to end up (on the freeway, possibly battling sandstorm ghouls). The mundane details of the players’ lives (chats between Ruth and her roommate; 10 pages of a family staycation that involves visiting a restaurant and caverns) do little to actually flesh out their personalities. Instead, they serve as digressions for readers to navigate until the excitement kicks in. When the storm hits, the tale is fun and campy—it just takes some detours to get there.
A thrilling ride that hits a few speed bumps along the way.Pub Date: March 28, 2022
ISBN: 979-8439881369
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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