A bold, largely successful launch of a series about family secrets and criminal enterprises.
A woman decides to get answers to the questions that have haunted her since childhood in this debut mystery.
When Jenny O’Rourke was just 10 years old, she heard her father leading a strange chant in the barn behind their small Pennsylvania farmhouse. Not long after, her brother, Danny, was dead, and her family escaped into the night. Twenty years later, she’s in the witness protection program, living under the name Tricia Keller. She’s finally put something of a life together—after a brief career in law and a short marriage, she’s now single and works as a pharmaceutical rep—but she’s risking it all by doing the thing she’s not supposed to do: “I’m absolutely forbidden to be sitting here in front of my childhood home. But here I am with two important mysteries to solve and a shit ton of minor league ones. First, who killed my brother? And why? Second, who—and what—the hell is my father?” She knows that before he moved his family to the obscure town of Brandtville, Pennsylvania, Sean O’Rourke was one of the top defense attorneys in Manhattan, a partner at a firm well known for representing embezzlers and mob bosses. Jenny assumes this job has something to do with the murder of Danny, but there are all sorts of strange things about her childhood in Brandtville: pictures of missing mobsters in the woods, odd symbols and graffiti, and her father’s former law partner, who wound up dead in a swimming hole. To conduct her investigation, Jenny will have to elude her witness protection escorts as well as the bodyguard her father keeps on her at all times. As she digs into the past, a few things soon become clear. First, Danny is still alive. Second, the story of what really happened back in Brandtville is far stranger than Jenny could ever have imagined—and it isn’t over yet.
Slawecki keeps the plot racing forward at full speed, and her prose is taut and gripping. At one point, Jenny muses: “What’s also disturbing is this whole modern-day vigilante thing. My father was a defense attorney. He knew his clients were bad people, especially those who went to that firm. No one forced him to get into that line of work. It’s why I stopped practicing after three cases.” The plot is booby-trapped with some pretty wonderful twists that will likely take even seasoned readers of the mystery genre by surprise. The book’s primary flaw is that its characters’ psychologies and personalities do not seem to match their personal histories. Jenny comes off as more devil-may-care than haunted, and her rapport with her now-living brother (whom she hasn’t seen since they were small children) is a bit too Hollywood smooth. Even so, the tale is fun and highly readable, making great use of its woodsy Bucks County setting. This is only the first installment of a series following Jenny, and readers will be excited to find out just how much weirder things will get.
A bold, largely successful launch of a series about family secrets and criminal enterprises.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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