Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.
Things are about to get bloody for a group of Charleston housewives.
In 1988, the scariest thing in former nurse Patricia Campbell’s life is showing up to book club, since she hasn’t read the book. It’s hard to get any reading done between raising two kids, Blue and Korey, picking up after her husband, Carter, a psychiatrist, and taking care of her live-in mother-in-law, Miss Mary, who seems to have dementia. It doesn’t help that the books chosen by the Literary Guild of Mt. Pleasant are just plain boring. But when fellow book-club member Kitty gives Patricia a gloriously trashy true-crime novel, Patricia is instantly hooked, and soon she’s attending a very different kind of book club with Kitty and her friends Grace, Slick, and Maryellen. She has a full plate at home, but Patricia values her new friendships and still longs for a bit of excitement. When James Harris moves in down the street, the women are intrigued. Who is this handsome night owl, and why does Miss Mary insist that she knows him? A series of horrific events stretches Patricia’s nerves and her Southern civility to the breaking point. (A skin-crawling scene involving a horde of rats is a standout.) She just knows James is up to no good, but getting anyone to believe her is a Sisyphean feat. After all, she’s just a housewife. Hendrix juxtaposes the hypnotic mundanity of suburbia (which has a few dark underpinnings of its own) against an insidious evil that has taken root in Patricia’s insular neighborhood. It’s gratifying to see her grow from someone who apologizes for apologizing to a fiercely brave woman determined to do the right thing—hopefully with the help of her friends. Hendrix (We Sold Our Souls, 2018, etc.) cleverly sprinkles in nods to well-established vampire lore, and the fact that he’s a master at conjuring heady 1990s nostalgia is just the icing on what is his best book yet.
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68369-143-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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SEEN & HEARD
Ex–County Coroner Dr. Sara Linton does seem to be managing a break from her own Job-like sufferings, at least for this...
Still more proof, if any were needed, that the most monstrous demons in Grant County, Ga., are lurking in the master bedroom.
Faith Mitchell, of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, returns home late from a training seminar to find her house trashed, her baby daughter locked in the shed, a man lying dead on the laundry-room floor—Faith herself will kill two other intruders before they can escape, and a third corpse will turn up in the trunk of the family car—and her mother gone. Capt. Evelyn Mitchell was eased into retirement from the Atlanta PD years ago after her narcotics squad was implicated in a web of corruption. Two of her former colleagues are doing time; a third, former Det. Boyd Spivey, is on death row for murder. So it’s not all that surprising that gang-bangers would have broken into her house looking for a big score. But why are their surviving colleagues in Los Texicanos and the Yellow Rebels suddenly so determined to annihilate each other, and how does Evelyn’s abduction fit into the picture? “I think we must be caught in the middle of some kind of war,” Faith’s boss, GBI deputy director Amanda Wagner, tells Faith’s partner, endlessly troubled Will Trent. The mounting body count, however, pales beside the ferocious conflicts among regulars in this high-octane series (Broken, 2010, etc.). Faith’s brother Zeke, returning from an Air Force posting, instantly resumes his long feud with her. Will is alternately abused by Amanda Wagner and his spiteful wife Angie. And Faith’s climactic showdown with her mother’s abductor will reveal far more personal motives for the runaway mayhem than she ever could have imagined.
Ex–County Coroner Dr. Sara Linton does seem to be managing a break from her own Job-like sufferings, at least for this installment.Pub Date: June 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-345-52820-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The fairy-tale ending calls for some convenient coincidences and changes of heart, but Scottoline’s legion of fans will be...
A Connecticut teacher’s long-sought and hard-fought pregnancy turns into a nightmare when Scottoline (Corrupted, 2015, etc.) unleashes one of her irresistible hooks on her.
Forced to extreme measures because her dreamy husband, Marcus, is sterile, Christine Nilsson has finally gotten pregnant using sperm from anonymous Donor 3319. At the party the staff at Nutmeg Hill Elementary have thrown to celebrate her departure, she gets a look at a serial killer doing his perp walk on TV, and he’s the spitting image of Donor 3319. When the Homestead Bank refuses to confirm or deny the identity of the donor, Christine and Marcus react in dramatically different ways. Marcus is determined to sue Homestead and whomever else is necessary to find out once and for all whether the father of the child he’s awaited so long has killed at least three nurses from Virginia to Pennsylvania. Christine persuades her best friend, Lauren Weingarten, to accompany her to West Chester, Pennsylvania, where Zachary Jeffcoat has been incarcerated, to ask him whether he’s Donor 3319. But Zachary is considerably shrewder and more manipulative than Christine, and before she knows it, she’s helping him instead of vice versa, finding him a raffish lawyer, volunteering to work as an unpaid paralegal to help with his defense, and interviewing the latest victim’s neighbors. As usual, the complications aren’t quite up to the level of the startling hook, and Christine needs more than a bit of luck to dig up the information she seeks. Along the way, she finds out a good many other things she definitely wasn’t looking for.
The fairy-tale ending calls for some convenient coincidences and changes of heart, but Scottoline’s legion of fans will be too relieved to object.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-01013-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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