A promising start to what could be a fresh paranormal-crime series, if plotting and characterization improve.
A crime novel set in the Colorado backcountry, mixing gritty suspense, supernatural horror, and Native American folklore.
Two hikers discover pieces of a dead body strewn around a snow-swept trail near the tourist town of Deadraven, Colorado. A disabled veteran nicknamed Radio monitors the report from his mountain cabin on a police scanner, except he learns about the grisly find before it actually happens. Logan Lone Bear Tuu’awta, newly returned to his hometown and interning with the local police, discovers the tracks of a large bear at the crime scene. He can also sense something else—a supernatural presence tied to his past. With this mix of horror, mystery, and the unexplained, Clark (The Devolution Chronicles: Rise of the Chimera, 2011, etc.) builds an intriguing setup and a diverse cast of characters. The bodies soon start piling up, with Radio providing Logan advance notice of new deaths. Along with his childhood friend Raven and Sheriff Billie Sue Martin, Logan must unravel the complicated mystery and track down the man-eating bear, which might be an invader from the spirit world. However, as the mystery progresses, the plot begins to get muddy. “Believe, and then you will see,” Ten Bears, a Medicine Man, tells Logan. But for readers unfamiliar with Native American mythology, additional explanation is needed to believe in Logan’s spiritual powers, which guide him in solving the mystery. Deeper, more developed back story early on would flesh out these intriguing characters as well. For example, what exactly happened to Logan in the 10 years he’s been gone from his hometown, and why did he decide to return? What in the sheriff’s checkered past has put her under the thumb of town leaders? And the climactic confrontation with the bear seems to come too soon. Without more information about past events, it’s difficult to make sense of Logan’s dreamlike confrontation with the bear. The extended explanation that follows deflates the fight scene’s action-packed punch.
A promising start to what could be a fresh paranormal-crime series, if plotting and characterization improve.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0985343859
Page Count: 286
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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