Harper has her finger firmly on the relentless pulse of quiet menace in this small-town mystery.
Five years after their son disappeared from their tiny Australian hometown, an estranged couple uncover disturbing clues.
Rowena Crowley has been grieving her son, Sam, since he disappeared five years ago, and she returns once a year to her former home, where her estranged husband, Griff, still lives. The remote community of Carralon Ridge is contracting by the minute thanks to an aggressive mining company; covered in grit, it literally hums with the industrial sounds of the mine and emits the palpable dismay of its remaining inhabitants. Every year the community comes together to mark the memory of Sam, who disappeared on his 21st birthday, including his sister, Della; his childhood friends, Jacob and Darcy; and Sylvie, who still opens the town pub from time to time. But this year is different: Ro and Griff come across a dark stain—could it be blood?—and a lost key in an abandoned house and begin to wonder if they’ve found a critical clue to their son’s disappearance. Harper is an expert at creating deeply atmospheric crime novels. Here she turns it up a notch with a setting that’s downright stifling with its sense of creeping menace: “Ro…felt on edge. She had the strong sensation of being in a dream where everything appeared normal, but daring to scratch the surface would reveal it as somehow distressing and wrong.” Between the townspeople’s reluctance to address certain topics and the confounding hints in Sam’s old notebook, which Ro has been parsing and rereading since his disappearance, there’s not a lot of give to the story at first. But as folks prepare to gather for Sam’s memorial, cake and all, fissures in the insular town’s relationships—romantic, platonic, intergenerational—expand, giving way to newfound knowledge, and Ro and Griff are forced to confront the choices they made five years earlier as well as realize that someone they’ve known for decades may well be more dangerous than they knew.
Harper has her finger firmly on the relentless pulse of quiet menace in this small-town mystery.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781250291394
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pine & Cedar/Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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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