Readers of faith may revel in these characters, their mistakes and their triumphs, but others might be turned off by the...
Strong Christian faith rescues friends and family from an onslaught of personal tragedies.
College senior Derek Jones, a young African-American man, seems to have everything going for him: a loving family, a gold-hearted girlfriend, athleticism and academic talent. Yet when he returns home for spring break, he puts a gun to his head and shows that his life was not what it seemed. Winding back several months, Derek’s problems begin when he abuses an ADHD medication to stay up late studying. His girlfriend, Serena, although once sexually active with Derek, has now chosen chastity before marriage, and frustration mounts between the two young lovers. Jasmine, an abused young woman who’s risen to campus fame by starting a high-end prostitution ring, zeroes in on Derek. She finally gets him to give in to sex when, at a lavish party, Derek gets drunk for the first time. Life at home is no better: Derek’s beloved sister Kenya is in need of $1,000 for unknown reasons, and his father’s adultery continues in their Christian home without anyone saying a word. When Derek ventures off campus in search of stronger drugs for his growing addiction, he gets attacked. In a moment of weakness while caring for him, Serena pushes her chastity vow aside and sleeps with Derek, resulting in pregnancy. Jasmine reveals more bad news, and it’s this troubled scene that Derek escapes when he takes his own life. His mother, Ruth, leans hard on her religious faith to restore her family and weather the final tragedy that Kenya brings upon them. Complex characters are often simplified in this melodramatic novel: Serena rises from her depression after a single conversation with Ruth; Ruth forgives her husband’s years of philandering after one good slap. There’s an after-school–special quality to the story as well; after getting drunk for the first time, Derek wonders aloud, “Why do people even drink liquor in the first place if it makes you feel this bad?” The story feels inauthentic at times, especially as the consequences—unwanted pregnancy, HIV, an attempted rape—rain down without pause. Yet the ultimate messages of faith and forgiveness ring clear, providing the novel its most uplifting, thoughtful scenes.
Readers of faith may revel in these characters, their mistakes and their triumphs, but others might be turned off by the heavy-handed plot.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491236611
Page Count: 246
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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