A delectable supernatural noir that should be thrown back in one shot.
This urban fantasy debut and series opener sees an immortal hunting a voodoo serial killer.
Sebastian Montero, an independently wealthy resident of Malibu, California, is immortal. He’s been alive for seven centuries, amassing riches, battling evil, and keeping his existence secret from society. The love of his long life is a vampire named Aliena who’s “lavishly feminine, Aphrodite’s dark reflection.” He owns BioLaw Industries, a research facility and forensics lab through which he helps the Los Angeles Police Department solve crimes. When 17-year-old Sherri Barlow is found at home hanging by her ankles, eviscerated, the immortal teams up with detectives Steven Hamilton and Alfred Gonzales to find the culprit. At a party at the Houdini Mansion, Sebastian is possessed by the spirit of a young woman, and he witnesses her mind regress “to that of a terrified child as she realizes she is going to die.” With a second victim, Jessica Patterson, the physical evidence of spices mixed into her blood and the eating of her heart points to a series of ritualistic killings. Sebastian’s BioLaw employees prove invaluable to the case, yet Hamilton loathes the idea that the paranormal might be involved—that the murderer is trying to become the Thief of Souls. In this decadent, addictive tale, Mongrain hard-boils the supernatural to perfection. His portrayal of Southern California, where “arid gusts ruffled the tops of the trees...bringing the thick smells of sage and chaparral,” should intoxicate readers as much as Sebastian’s playboy worship of Aliena, who feeds on the immortal (“She slowly licked the blood off” his finger “with her smooth, icy tongue”). Other facets of Sebastian’s unique state include the abilities to forgo food and sleep and to heal quickly. The author reveals these details not in passing but in careful flashbacks to his protagonist’s youth in the 13th century. Regarding sleep, “I had seen my parents in this otherworldly state...but I assumed it was something that happened to you when you were older.” Mongrain’s compact prose delivers a satisfyingly epic procedural while teasing further dark corners of his world.
A delectable supernatural noir that should be thrown back in one shot.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9974098-1-9
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Crescent Moon Books
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Stand did less well than The Shining, and The Dead Zone will do less well than either—as the King of high horror (Carrie) continues to move away from the grand-gothic strain that once distinguished him from the other purveyors of psychic melodrama. Here he's taken on a political-suspense plot formula that others have done far better, giving it just the merest trappings of deviltry. Johnnie Smith of Cleaves Mills, Maine, is a super-psychic; after a four-year coma, he has woken up to find that he can see the future—all of it except for certain areas he calls the "dead zone." So Johnnie can do great things, like saving a friend from death-by-lightning or reuniting his doctor with long-lost relatives. But Johnnie also can see a horrible presidential candidate on the horizon. He's Mayor Gregory Aromas Stillson of Ridgeway, N.H., and only Johnnie knows that this apparently klutzy candidate is really the devil incarnate—that if Stillson is elected he'll become the new Hitler and plunge the world into atomic horror! What can Johnnie do? All he can do is try to assassinate this Satanic candidate—in a climactic shootout that is recycled and lackluster and not helped by King's clumsy social commentary (". . . it was as American as The Wonderful Worm of Disney"). Johnnie is a faceless hero, and never has King's banal, pulpy writing been so noticeable in its once-through-the-typewriter blather and carelessness. Yes, the King byline will ensure a sizeable turnout, but the word will soon get around that the author of Carrie has this time churned out a ho-hum dud.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1979
ISBN: 0451155750
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1979
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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