A promising opening to what's billed as a series of Hard Girls novels.
Versatile literary mockingbird Lennon ventures into the thriller genre, for the most part persuasively.
Things are not as they seem. Jane Pool has a pleasant but dead-end job as an academic administrator, a hometown-sweetheart husband, a cranky but loving preteen daughter; she helps tend to her father, an aging and absent-minded professor; she looks like a typical upstate New York mom in her 30s. But, we discover, this ordinariness is deceptive: part aspiration gone awry, part hopeful mask, part dodge, part cover. Jane's husband's heart has soured, as have her feelings for him; her mother-in-law is eager to alienate her daughter's affections, and has as ammunition the fact that Jane gave birth in prison, a fact her daughter doesn't know from an era about which she's never been told. As the book begins, Jane stumbles across an encrypted email in her spam folder. Her estranged twin sister, Lila, has a lead on the whereabouts of the mother who long ago abandoned them, and Lila invites, or summons, her sister to join in the search. Lennon makes nice use of the initially inexplicable cloak-and-dagger of this, building suspense as the reader puzzles over why all of it—Jane's deeply buried secrets, her sister's elaborate spycraft, their mother's self-vanishing, and more—came to be necessary. The book jumps back and forth in time to good effect, and what we learn about the shocking act of violence that disrupted the girls' youth and eventually separated them helps illuminate their present-tense pursuit of their mother across the Mountain West and beyond. The first 40 pages or so are a hint slow to kindle, and the ending feels hurried, but the middle of this book is tautly suspenseful, cleverly plotted, and psychologically compelling; these are damaged, resourceful women who make intriguingly flawed, flinty protagonists.
A promising opening to what's billed as a series of Hard Girls novels.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780316550581
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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