Well-written and engaging, with memorable characters and an intriguing hero.
In this debut thriller, a pilot survives a crash and discovers that he’s developed strange abilities, which come in handy when someone kidnaps his friend’s daughter.
Will Stewart, a 30-something pilot for Essex County Air Services, wakes in an Essex, Wisconsin, hospital with a broken pelvis, lucky to be alive after his twin-engine airplane accident. He remembers nothing—but what’s more unsettling is the fact that he’s floating 6 feet above his bed, his body invisible. When the moment passes, Will initially chalks it up to a morphine-induced hallucination. Later, he’s not so sure, but he’s hesitant about testing himself further. For one thing, he doesn’t want to give his 23-year-old police-sergeant wife, Andrea “Andy” Taylor, anything else to worry about. However, Will can’t resist using his new powers, especially after he’s home from the hospital. With practice, he discovers that he can control his invisible floating, and that anything he’s wearing becomes invisible, as well. For a man who loves flying planes, it’s a huge rush: “I felt joy in its purest form. First solo flight joy. First time popping up through the clouds joy. First love joy.” Will perfects his floating technique a bit slowly, but it’s enjoyable to watch his growing mastery. Then disaster hits when gangsters kidnap Lane Franklin, the 14-year-old daughter of the air service’s office manager, in Essex, where she and her mother live. A member of the gang later tells Andy that Lane was “selected by someone big, someone on top.” The cop joins the hunt to find her, and Will feels “the dawning of a brilliant, and possibly insane idea” involving his new abilities. If he can pull it off, he’ll save an innocent girl from a terrible fate. Seaborne, a flight instructor and charter pilot, vividly evokes the world of charter airlines and those who populate them, particularly with his well-drawn character sketches. For example, he ably evokes the owner of Essex County Air Services, Earl Jackson, who sold his lucrative business and now “prefers to spend his days sitting in a tiny office crammed with maintenance manuals and pondering fuel purchases.” The book offers lots of information on aviation and law enforcement, but it’s nicely counterbalanced with warm human relationships, such as the one between Will and Andy. The novel’s latter half shows how Will’s practice sessions pay off, offering several satisfying outcomes. However, this second part lacks the plausibility that Seaborne so carefully constructs in the first, and more closely resembles an extended action sequence in a superhero tale, although, in this case, Will is still learning to control his powers. The thugs are standard issue, and with few candidates to choose from, the main villain’s identity isn’t hard to guess. That said, Milwaukee is well-described, from its boarded-up inner-city houses to its luxe mansions on Lake Drive. Altogether, this book is a strong start to a series, which will continue in Divisible Man: The Sixth Pawn.
Well-written and engaging, with memorable characters and an intriguing hero.Pub Date: June 6, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 319
Publisher: Trans World Data
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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