A gripping thriller with as many twists and turns as a cross-country road trip.
A young man set to inherit his dead father’s fortune runs into a charismatic drifter on a cross-country trip in this thriller from Maffei (And of the Holy Ghost, 2010, etc.).
Days away from his 25th birthday and the receipt of his delayed but sizable inheritance, Nick Bennett dumps his gold-digger girlfriend and heads west to California. Nick runs over a turtle and winds up in a ditch. A stranger named Henry appears on the scene—he may have caused the accident—and helps Nick get his car back on the road. Henry is charming and capable, a jack-of-all-trades at home on the open road. The two get along like old friends, and, ignoring a series of unsettling episodes, Nick brings Henry to his father’s house. There the two meet Bunny, a black documentary filmmaker who is working on a project about Nick’s writer father. Nick and Bunny woo each other awkwardly, but Henry turns out to be more devious and dangerous than Nick has allowed himself to understand, and the final pages are a kaleidoscope of violence, betrayal, epiphany and murder. The pages fly once we meet Henry, a thoroughly creepy villain whose intelligence and menace push the story in consistently unpredictable directions. Henry pontificates, giving out commandments, using his charm and the force of his personality to get what he wants from everyone he meets—everything readers could want in a psychological thriller’s bad guy. But the book does have some issues—Nick’s speech patterns change suddenly and without reason or comment, the female characters are mostly sex objects and when Nick and Henry have their reckoning, Nick’s reliance on and devotion to Henry becomes more complex but also strains believability. And Bunny’s thread contains disturbing racial content that could offend many readers.
A gripping thriller with as many twists and turns as a cross-country road trip.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-1449911775
Page Count: 146
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
No wonder Scarpetta asks, “When did my workplace become such a soap opera?” Answer: at least 10 years ago.
Happy birthday, Dr. Kay Scarpetta. But no Florida vacation for you and your husband, FBI profiler Benton Wesley—not because President Barack Obama is visiting Cambridge, but because a deranged sniper has come to town.
Shortly after everyone’s favorite forensic pathologist (Dust, 2013, etc.) receives a sinister email from a correspondent dubbed Copperhead, she goes outside to find seven pennies—all polished, all turned heads-up, all dated 1981—on her garden wall. Clearly there’s trouble afoot, though she’s not sure what form it will take until five minutes later, when a call from her old friend and former employee Pete Marino, now a detective with the Cambridge Police, summons her to the scene of a shooting. Jamal Nari was a high school music teacher who became a minor celebrity when his name was mistakenly placed on a terrorist watch list; he claimed government persecution, and he ended up having a beer with the president. Now he’s in the news for quite a different reason. Bizarrely, the first tweets announcing his death seem to have preceded it by 45 minutes. And Leo Gantz, a student at Nari’s school, has confessed to his murder, even though he couldn’t possibly have done it. But these complications are only the prelude to a banquet of homicide past and present, as Scarpetta and Marino realize when they link Nari’s murder to a series of killings in New Jersey. For a while, the peripheral presence of the president makes you wonder if this will be the case that finally takes the primary focus off the investigator’s private life. But most of the characters are members of Scarpetta’s entourage, the main conflicts involve infighting among the regulars, and the killer turns out to be a familiar nemesis Scarpetta thought she’d left for dead several installments back. As if.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-232534-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying...
King (Under the Dome, 2009, etc.) adds counterfactual historian to his list of occupations.
Well, not exactly: The author is really turning in a sturdy, customarily massive exercise in time travel that just happens to involve the possibility of altering history. Didn’t Star Trek tell us not to do that? Yes, but no matter: Up in his beloved Maine, which he celebrates eloquently here (“For the first time since I’d topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Dery hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy”), King follows his own rules. In this romp, Jake Epping, a high-school English teacher (vintage King, that detail), slowly comes to see the opportunity to alter the fate of a friend who, in one reality, is hale and hearty but in another dying of cancer, no thanks to a lifetime of puffing unfiltered cigarettes. Epping discovers a time portal tucked away in a storeroom—don’t ask why there—and zips back to 1958, where not just his friend but practically everyone including the family pets smokes: “I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by.” A different world indeed: In this one, Jake, a sort of sad sack back in Reality 1, finds love and a new identity in Reality 2. Not just that, but he now sees an opportunity to unmake the past by inserting himself into some ugly business involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, various representatives of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and JFK in Dallas in the fall of 1963. It would be spoiling things to reveal how things turn out; suffice it to say that any change in Reality 2 will produce a change in Reality 1, not to mention that Oswald may have been a patsy, just as he claimed—or maybe not. King’s vision of one outcome of the Kennedy assassination plot reminds us of what might have been—that is, almost certainly a better present than the one in which we’re all actually living. “If you want to know what political extremism can lead to,” warns King in an afterword, “look at the Zapruder film.”
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying yarn.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2728-2
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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