Straightforward suspense served without guile or gimmick.
When the pop pop pop of shots sound off at college move-in day, Julia Bennett is the first to recognize the menace, intuitively dropping and rolling to protect her daughter, Cora. The aftermath brings: a grazed Cora; her murdered stepmother, Brie; long-suppressed memories of Julia’s own troubled past; and her increasing suspicion that what seems like just another random mass shooting in America is actually anything but.
Julia is a botany professor at Anderson Hughes, the San Diego college where Cora will be a freshman. Julia is also a connoisseur of carnivorous plants and is long divorced from Cora’s dad, Eric, who has a shiny new life with Brie. While Julia reluctantly confirms her doubts about the shooting (“If the sniper attack was random, why did it end so quickly? And why weren’t more people dead?” she asks herself), she’s also forced to reckon with the violence that ended her own youth: the shooting deaths of her parents when she was 14. As Julia unpacks the shooting, up in Los Angeles, contract killer Ren Petrovic is realizing she’s got some mysteries of her own to solve. She’s learned about the Anderson Hughes killings on the news and recognizes the work of her husband and partner, Nolan. Ren is a second-generation assassin, raised to take on only “ethical kills,” meaning the target—not the victim, if you please—deserves their fate. But Nolan no longer seems as committed to the mission and has started bending their rules. When it comes out that Brie is the daughter of Oliver Baird, a Malibu billionaire who happens to be Nolan’s best client, the dovetailing of the two women’s stories becomes inevitable. This is author Chavez’s third suspense novel, and she writes well: Before the attack, the packed crowd of students and parents “undulated like a snake digesting”; afterward, Eric “wore the past two days as thick stubble along his jaw and bruise-like smudges beneath his eyes.” The two protagonists nicely mirror each other, sharing a chaotic upbringing, a cerebral reserve paired with extreme capability, a love of mordant plants (Ren’s specialty is poison, and she grows her own). Though the book doesn’t quite stick the landing—for all its tragedy, Julia’s backstory is uninteresting, and Ren’s naïveté is hard to fathom—it’s well paced, often gripping, and builds with expert tension.
Straightforward suspense served without guile or gimmick.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9780316531351
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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