A fascinating blend of action and personal drama set in the boiling Texas landscape.
In Ryan’s thriller, a loner finds friendship, community, and danger in a small Texas town.
As the novel opens, Jake Plumb is driving along the hot, dry roads of Texas in search of a new life, or at least an end to the chaos of his old one. A trained engineer who’d been unwillingly involved in a bridge disaster that cost dozens of lives, Plumb is now a drifter with a growing alcohol problem, seeking some kind of oblivion: “A place free from time—no future, no past. Just now. Stasis. An end to memories and futures. Nothing to haunt a fellow.” When Plumb encounters the small, dusty town of Terlingua, he thinks it might be as good a place to start over as any. He heads to the bar, orders a meal and a beer, and is immediately approached by Chavez, the town’s tough-but-fair sheriff, who wants a friendly chat. The next day, Sheriff Chavez bumps this up to a friendly warning: Either Plumb gets in his truck and moves on out of town, or he accepts a position as a probationary deputy, helping Chavez out at the office. Chavez has his own motive for wasting the engineer’s talents on simple office work: the sheriff is illiterate, and therefore can’t do most of the work himself. Plumb decides to accept the offer, and the two are immediately called to the scene of an auto accident that takes a surprising turn—the dead body pinned under the car turns to dust before their eyes. The incident will pit this mismatched pair against a powerful drug cartel and involve them in a mystery that extends well beyond sleepy little Terlingua.
Ryan skillfully lays the groundwork for the tense confrontation that builds steadily through the book; this is a well-handled crime thriller, with Chavez, Plumb, and a heroic dog quickly finding themselves facing powerful, sophisticated enemies. The action, particularly at the novel’s climax, is sharply done and will satisfy pretty much any thriller fan. But the narrative’s strongest element is perhaps its most surprising: Both men at the center of the story are struggling to find better versions of themselves, and they largely succeed with each other’s help. Sheriff Chavez sees this exchange more clearly than Plumb does at first. “He could redraw Jake while Jake began to redraw Chavez’s world,” he thinks. “That would help Jake and him.” For Plumb’s part, he finds unexpected friendship with both Chavez and the dog, Idyll. The author periodically gives readers intriguing insights into how this former engineer sees the world: “Jake solved problems by seeing a video in his head playing out to a solution,” Ryan writes. “When the picture was right, the solution would be right.” Even as the dangerous plot escalates, readers will be equally fascinated by the sympathetic and deepening examination of the two central characters as they’re put under greater and greater pressure. Chavez, whose own life was turned around by the tough love of a lawman years earlier, is happy to pay things forward with Jake Plumb, and readers will be gratified as Plumb reaffirms his scientific skills while also adding new dimensions to his life, from archery to law enforcement.
A fascinating blend of action and personal drama set in the boiling Texas landscape.Pub Date: May 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781665774918
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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