A simmering psychological thriller bolstered by a dynamic narrative voice and a few unexpected twists.
A group of close friends find themselves embroiled in a sinister plot in novelist and playwright Odentz’s (Wicked Dead, 2016, etc.) latest YA novel.
Four high school seniors wake up deep in the woods on the outskirts of bucolic Meadowfield, Massachusetts. To their horror, each of their bodies has been altered in some fashion, and none of the kids have any memories of the previous night. Odentz has the quick-witted Weston Kahn narrate the story with youthful personality and humor as he observes his friends, including local jock Anders Stephenson, who’s covered in blood; alien-conspiracy theorist Robbie Myers, who’s missing his glass eye; and confidante Marcy, who’s missing her pants. Weston himself has a tiny, triangular symbol burned into his arm. The shell-shocked quartet stumbles home, and each teen attempts to cover for the others. Further mayhem begins almost immediately: Weston thinks that Sandra Berman, a teenage girl who went missing three years ago, may have been the victim of a homicide just across the street from her house—the victim of a serial killer who threatens the sleepy town’s sense of security. Blurry memories start to return to the teen foursome, Anders begins exhibiting strangely violent behavior, and they eventually determine that someone drugged them all. They attempt to solve the mystery themselves even while admitting that going to “a hospital is probably the right thing to do—even the smart thing to do.” As the slightly convoluted puzzle pieces start to fall into place, deep secrets are revealed and guilty parties make their move to silence the group. Overall, this novel is creative, atmospheric, and effectively detailed, and Odentz maintains a firm grasp on the conversational tone and flow of the story, which seems tailor-made for YA suspense fans. He builds out his novel subtly and incrementally with interrelated characterizations of the teenagers and their family members, and he keeps the story moving with fine pacing, realistic dialogue, and a good sense of place. Throughout, he empowers his characters with intriguing histories, melodramatic infighting, and general teenage growing pains that bring them to vibrant life.
A simmering psychological thriller bolstered by a dynamic narrative voice and a few unexpected twists.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-6119483-6-3
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Bell Bridge Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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