Good escapist reading in the Dan Brown vein. And these writers can write.
An entertaining if sometimes far-fetched religious-tinged thriller by mysterians Rollins (Bloodline, 2012, etc.) and Cantrell (A City of Broken Glass, 2012, etc.).
What if the Vatican were built atop a pet cemetery or the moral equivalent of an Indian burial ground? What if Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents had actually happened? What if Saint Peter, the rock on which the church was built, was an action hero? All these possibilities pop up in Rollins and Cantrell’s confection, which operates on the always tetchy premise that Christ’s blood sacrifice finds responses in the blood sacrifices of others, including unwilling virgins—or so the evidence suggests when an earthquake in Masada, site of yet another blood sacrifice all those years ago, exposes a cave inside of which is found the mummy of a girl throwing most curious mudras. Soon, an unlikely cast from the worlds of archaeology, religion, warfare and crime fighting descends on the place, and what they piece together over the course of the narrative threatens—natch—to shake the world of organized Christianity to the ground, not least because Christ himself has a few revisions to make in the record. There are lots of Indiana Jones–like moments throughout (“It is no mere weapon,” says a warrior priest. “It’s a symbol of Christ. That is beyond weaponry.”), a little romance, lots of car chases and explosions, and lots of oddball twists, including encounters with a strange Russian priest named Rasputin, a mysterious Eastern European heavy with the most suggestive name of Bathory and a gaggle of goal-oriented fanatics. And does the firmament crack open as the “great War of the Heavens looms”? That depends on whether you see room for a sequel at the end of this romp.
Good escapist reading in the Dan Brown vein. And these writers can write.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-199104-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
Piercingly effective and genuinely terrifying.
A savage debut thriller that renders the Electra complex electric, the mother/daughter bond a psychopathic stranglehold.
Camille Preaker is a cutter. At 13, she carved “queasy” above her navel, at 29, “vanish” on her neck. In the intervening years, she etched her entire epidermis from the chin down with cries for help. Entertainment Weekly TV critic Flynn discloses this information 60 pages into her explosive novel; before that, we know Camille as a hard-drinking, good-looking Jimmy Breslin wannabe, sent by a second-tier paper to cover two gruesome killings in her Missouri hometown. Nine-year-old Natalie’s corpse was found jammed between the Cut-n-Curl Beauty Parlor and Bifty’s Hardware nine months after another’s girl’s body was dumped in a creek. The murderer’s grisly signature? Both strangled corpses had their teeth yanked out. As she snoops around, Camille gets hot for a cute detective and anxious in her mother’s house. Haunted by the ghost of her sister, a child felled by mysterious illness, Camille warily befriends half-sister Amma, a snaky Lolita with precociously developed smarts and breasts. Bite-sized Queen of Mean who rules the town’s teens, Amma joins Camille in shuddering at their mother, Aurora, an oh-so-proper virago who pulls down a million dollars a year running a pig slaughterhouse. Mommie Dearest is afflicted with an outré psychological disturbance: She inflicts illness on her loved ones to then prove her sweetness by nursing them. Could she be the slayer? Or perhaps an even more hideous revelation awaits? Flynn delivers a great whodunit, replete with hinting details, telling dialogue, dissembling clues. Better yet, she offers appalling, heartbreaking insight into the darkness of her women’s lives: the Stepford polish of desperate housewives, the backstabbing viciousness of drug-gobbling, sex-for-favors Mean Girls, the simmering rage bound to boil over.
Piercingly effective and genuinely terrifying.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-34154-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Fans of Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins will find this comfortingly familiar despite (or maybe because of?) the shocks and...
In Pinborough’s (Behind Her Eyes, 2018, etc.) twisty, decade-spanning, multivoiced thriller, everyone has secrets: teenager Ava; her mom, Lisa; and Lisa’s best friend, Marilyn.
On the surface, all three women fulfill the roles expected of them, and they support and love one another, but they don’t truly know each other. Ava, a competitive swimmer, is finishing up her exams and sneaking around with her first boyfriend while overly protective mom Lisa is about to clinch a big contract at work—and maybe even go on a date with a handsome millionaire client. Marilyn has been dealing with headaches at home, but she’s still game for a shopping trip to outfit Lisa for that big date. Soon, however, they will discover that someone else in their lives has a secret much darker than any they carry. This person is a murderer who is stalking a childhood friend who, they believe, betrayed their deepest trust. There are a lot of plot twists and reveals within the novel, some of which are surprising, some of which are expected. Pinborough weaves several different time periods and several different narrative voices to create layers of character and conflict, but the characters are types often found in psychological thrillers, and while their problems are often relatable, at least at first, they aren’t particularly engaging. It’s clear which decisions, and which silences, are going to get them into trouble, and yet, as people do, they carry on anyway. The one element that sets Pinborough’s novel apart from the slew of similar thrillers is the emphasis on female empowerment and the power of female relationships. These women need no one to save them, no knights in shining armor or handsome cops. As Marilyn succinctly puts it, “Fuck. That. Shit.”
Fans of Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins will find this comfortingly familiar despite (or maybe because of?) the shocks and turns along the way.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-285679-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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