A gripping and psychologically sharp crime drama.
In this thriller, a group of strangers find themselves bound together in the aftermath of a catastrophe that’s reminiscent of the 9/11 attacks.
Caleb Drake takes the train from his residential suburb to Manhattan for work each day—a routine that’s typically uneventful. But on Oct. 10, he notices two small planes flying uncommonly low over the Hudson River, which turns out to be a harbinger of trouble. The train suddenly stops, and the frazzled passengers quickly discover that almost no one has cellphone service—and they’re certain that something terrible has happened when the train’s conductor, Charlie Murray, announces an order from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for everyone to remain on board. Unconfirmed rumors swirl like swarms of bees—maybe there was an explosion, there are evacuations underway—sending the train’s passengers into a spiraling panic. James Roth, one particularly agitated man, flees in defiance of the lockdown, intent on closing a billion-dollar deal in the city. Others quickly follow his lead, including Caleb and Rachel Silver, a real estate agent who seems to have the only working cellphone. Debut author Mott impressively unfurls a complex, suspenseful plot that launches with what turns out to be a terror attack. Caleb and Rachel are later drawn toward each other romantically, as both feel stuck in marriages that have lost their luster. Also, the death of Charlie’s father—who has a heart attack after someone steals his car—pulls the characters into what’s effectively a murder investigation. The author cleverly braids the lives of the various players into a coherent narrative tapestry, and he astutely dramatizes how crises can inspire promises that are abandoned later on. Caleb is tortured by his failure to fulfill his own pledges (“Don’t be trapped inside a haphazardly built life, a mind-numbing routine scraped together with bits and pieces of detritus from other people’s lives”), and Mott movingly depicts his struggle. However, Roth comes off as more of a cartoonish caricature—pure hubris incarnate—and readers may find his shallowness hard to believe.
A gripping and psychologically sharp crime drama.Pub Date: June 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9976405-7-1
Page Count: 345
Publisher: Val de Grace
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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