England's prolific Masterton (Flights of Fear, 1996, etc.) begins a new horror series featuring Jim Rook, a California psychic who teaches a remedial class in a San Fernando Valley high school. A bout of pneumonia that nearly killed him as a child has granted Rook psychic insight, though he doesn't realize it. One morning he interrupts a bloody battle in the boys' room between Tee Jay Jones and Elvin P. Clay. Then Rook discovers Elvin's body in a boiler room, with 112 stab wounds. Tee Jay is arrested, but Rook sees a black-suited man flitting about the halls and at the scene of the murder—though no one else can see this figure. Jim's palm-reading neighbor, Mrs. Vaizey, tries to awaken him to his greater psychic abilities, which Jim denies. Meanwhile, he leads his class through On the Road. Then the shadow man, a.k.a. The Smoke, approaches Jim and tells him that he needs his help. Jim is sure that Tee Jay's Uncle Umber, a follower of voodoo, is Elvin's murderer, and that The Smoke is somehow connected to Umber. When Mrs. Vaizey goes out-of-body to help Jim by infiltrating Uncle Umber's apartment, Jim watches in horror as she is killed in a particularly gruesome manner. The Smoke also begins appearing in Jim's classroom; at first only Jim and Tee Jay can see him, although the other kids eventually also become aware of him. Uncle Umber wants Jim to act as his messenger to a leading drug dealer and to tell him that he wants 90 percent of the dealer's take on every shipment. The Smoke, it turns out, is Umber's uncanny henchman. In the end, only Jim and his students can stand up to The Smoke, by robbing Uncle Umber of the voodoo stick that focuses his power. A sympathetic, poetry-reading hero provides Masterton with many better-than-average pages.
Pub Date: April 15, 1997
ISBN: 0-7278-4991-3
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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