Amateurish and often laughable—but at least it’s not ordinary.
A disgraced Australian wellness guru heads up the cast of a du Maurier–inspired thriller.
“Yesterday I found an article about Barnsley House in an old magazine.” Just as this doesn’t quite have the resonance of “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” Cockram’s debut—containing characters named Daphne and Max Summer (not de Winter), an evil housekeeper, a house fire, etc.—does not benefit by comparison to its model. So let’s forget that for now. “ ‘Promise me, Miranda. Promise me not to be ordinary.’ Her lip curled slightly at the word. ‘Promise me you’ll be an amazing woman too.’ " The late Tessa Summer’s exhortation to her daughter, Miranda, may have inspired the ambition that led to Miranda's claims that her Instagram-famous healthy recipes could cure infertility, but the only amazing things about her moment in the spotlight are a) that it ever happened, and b) the public humiliation that followed. Now Miranda’s appropriated Daddy’s credit card and is headed to the English country estate where her mother was raised, currently a destination restaurant and hotel, whose history Tessa wrote about in an international bestseller called The House of Brides. Apparently a compulsive liar, Miranda pretends she’s answering an ad looking for a nanny rather than reveal her blood relationship to the Summer family. The littlest child is in a wheelchair, there’s a cracked-up car in the driveway, the hotel and restaurant are closed, the kids' uninvolved mother vanishes within days of Miranda’s arrival, and on top of all this tsuris, the accidental nanny develops obsessional “cravings for food devoid of any nutritional value.” When she tears up upon hearing someone finally say something nice about Tessa, she attributes it to “all the processed food I was eating.” One hopes this is supposed to be funny. Parody would have been the best bet for this novel, with its two-dimensional characters, passion for clichés, and bewilderingly overcomplicated plot which relies on novelistic diary passages and closed-circuit security videos to make any sense at all.
Amateurish and often laughable—but at least it’s not ordinary.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-293929-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
