For those who can withstand the difficult subject of infanticide, a suspenseful courtroom drama full of poignant flashbacks...
Two sisters re-examine their relationship as one of them stands trial for murdering the other’s infant.
Martha Blackwater’s 8-week-old baby, Layla, suffocated while she was under her aunt Becky’s care. The book opens several months after the baby’s death, as Martha attends Becky’s trial, desperately hoping to be convinced of her sister’s innocence. Becky had been working as a nanny for Layla, a plan the sisters hatched when Becky complained about her dead-end job as a set designer. Feeling as though she’s never measured up to her perfect older sister, Becky is determined to excel at being a nanny. Doctors hypothesize that Layla suffers from gastric distress, but they are unable to alleviate her symptoms, and the baby cries incessantly. When Martha leaves town on a business trip at the same time that her husband, Scott, is traveling, Becky is left to care for Layla, and to suffer her endless crying, for two nights. The prosecution now insists that the child’s interminable crying pushed Becky over the edge, leading her to smother Layla into silence. As Martha listens to the prosecution, she cannot believe that Becky would ever harm her child. However, with each witness’s surprising testimony, Martha begins to wonder whether she’s ever known her sister at all. As Martha and Becky take turns narrating this tale, they provide details on both the courtroom events and their personal histories, showcasing their deep bond and subtle resentments. The author also includes chapters told from the perspectives of several witnesses, with each of these chapters appearing immediately before the same witness testifies in court. Rather than feeling repetitive, this approach emphasizes the differences between real-life events and courtroom testimony, a medium through which facts can easily get warped. Through these varying perspectives, the author draws complex, nuanced characters while also illustrating the litany of emotions that can torment bereft parents. With fast-paced prose and several unexpected twists, the author skillfully weaves a web in which any of the characters might be the guilty party.
For those who can withstand the difficult subject of infanticide, a suspenseful courtroom drama full of poignant flashbacks and unique insights.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53939-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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