An eerie but inviting debut.
In the first of a planned trilogy, a writer grieving the loss of her 4-year-old son becomes enmeshed with the subjects of her true-crime book-in-progress.
Shortly after the tragic death of her only child, Keegan, from a brain aneurysm, Charlotte "Charlie" Cates changes careers. Leaving her job at a Cosmopolitan-like Manhattan magazine, she accepts an assignment from a true-crime publisher to chronicle the disappearance of toddler Gabriel Deveau nearly 30 years before from his home, a Louisiana estate called Evangeline. Shortly after Keegan’s death, Charlie began having clairvoyant dreams about children in jeopardy, which have always proven true, and she has had one about Gabriel’s fate: it involves a boat, a swamp, and sexual abuse. Once ensconced in a guest cottage at Evangeline—the Deveau family thinks she's there to write a revisionist family history—Charlie begins digging. When one of her visions helps a local police detective, Remy Minot, find solace after his daughter’s death, he gives Charlie the inside track on the cold case investigation. After Gabriel vanished from his nursery in 1982, his parents, his much older siblings, his nanny, and her husband were all ruled out as suspects. Now, the widowed matriarch, Hettie Deveau, is dying of cancer and, unbeknownst to the surviving Deveau children, has altered her will, leaving the Deveau fortune to a historical foundation. Tentatively, Charlie begins an affair with Noah, hired by Hettie as a landscaper, who is actually the nanny’s grandson. Although from opposite poles socioeconomically, Charlie and Noah have similar issues—both were raised by grandparents after being abandoned by parents, both have recently undergone messy divorces. When the finger of suspicion begins to point to Noah’s father, Sean, who disappeared shortly before Gabriel did, the couple’s fledgling relationship is tested. Complications proliferate, and the resolution is improbable, but the hothouse atmosphere of Evangeline and the tortuous and tangled motives of its denizens make for an enjoyable puzzle box of a mystery.
An eerie but inviting debut.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-17400-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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