Creepy, slightly naughty fun.
A very black comedy from British newcomer Hill about the boundaries that divide perception from fact and obsession from healthy curiosity.
In her late thirties, tall, attractive Justine Fraser works in a bookstore in her hometown on the coast of England. She lives alone and semi-dates devoted Gavin, but the love of her life remains Nicky Bennet, whom she met during a semester abroad at Lowell University (think Dartmouth). After a rapturous, sexually adventurous semester, they parted, planning to rendezvous in New York. He never showed, but the next summer he appeared at her parents’ house in England claiming he’d been stuck in New Jersey traffic (shades of An Affair to Remember). They fell back into each other’s arms, he proposed marriage and spent a passionate 11 days with her. Then he disappeared again after a bit of overzealous foreplay sent her to the emergency room with a broken wrist. Twenty years later Nicky has become a Hollywood movie star, and now he’s in the news because he’s disappeared from the set of his new picture. As Justine tells her story, she explains that she is not obsessed with Nicky. Although she considers him the great love of her life and has casually kept up with his career, she swears she’s happy with her single life and is full of the self-deprecating, sharp-tongued humor that chic lit fans have grown to trust in their heroines. But Nicky’s disappearance upsets her, particularly because he leaves a note that echoes the suicide note Justine’s older sister left before killing herself when Justine was a teen. In a quest for closure she travels to the US and searches for Nicky. Along the way, readers realize that Justine is not a very dependable narrator and that her story has more in common with Fatal Attraction than Bridget Jones’s Diary.
Creepy, slightly naughty fun.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-074528-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
An exciting, thought-provoking mind-bender.
In Crouch’s sci-fi–driven thriller, a machine designed to help people relive their memories creates apocalyptic consequences.
In 2018, NYPD Detective Barry Sutton unsuccessfully tries to talk Ann Voss Peters off the edge of the Poe Building. She claims to have False Memory Syndrome, a bewildering condition that seems to be spreading. People like Ann have detailed false memories of other lives lived, including marriages and children, but in “shades of gray, like film noir stills.” For some, like Ann, an overwhelming sense of loss leads to suicide. Barry knows loss: Eleven years ago, his 15-year-old daughter, Meghan, was killed by a hit-and-run driver. Details from Ann’s story lead him to dig deeper, and his investigation leads him to a mysterious place called Hotel Memory, where he makes a life-altering discovery. In 2007, a ridiculously wealthy philanthropist and inventor named Marcus Slade offers neuroscientist Helena Smith the chance of a lifetime and an unlimited budget to build a machine that allows people to relive their memories. He says he wants to “change the world.” Helena hopes that her mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, will benefit from her passion project. The opportunity for unfettered research is too tempting to turn down. However, when Slade takes the research in a controversial direction, Helena may have to destroy her dream to save the world. Returning to a few of the themes he explored in Dark Matter (2016), Crouch delivers a bullet-fast narrative and raises the stakes to a fever pitch. A poignant love story is woven in with much food for thought on grief and the nature of memories and how they shape us, rounding out this twisty and terrifying thrill ride.
An exciting, thought-provoking mind-bender.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-5978-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
An unmissable thriller.
For every child kidnapped, another must be taken. Otherwise The Chain will be broken.
Thirteen-year-old Kylie is waiting for the school bus on Plum Island, Massachusetts, when a man and a woman pull up wearing ski masks. Her brain tells her to run, but she doesn’t make the correct split-second decision, and she is taken at gunpoint. Her mother, Rachel, then receives a call that she is now part of The Chain. She must pay a ransom and kidnap another family’s child, and then that family must do the same for her daughter to be released. No law enforcement, no politicians, no journalists. The Chain cannot be broken or the children—her child, her Kylie—will be executed. While Rachel scrambles to get the money together (even though it isn’t about the money, she is told) and pick a child to steal, it becomes clear that she is being tracked and her every move is being monitored. She can’t do this, she must do this, she is now a completely different person who has done this. Inspired by the “exchange kidnappings” that take place in Mexico and the old-school chain letters of his childhood, crime novelist McKinty (Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly, 2017, etc.) takes what at first seems like a fantastical scenario and imbues it with all the terror, stress, trauma, and messiness of reality. At once a commentary on social media, greed, revenge, love, and true evil, and written with an almost lyrical quality, this book will have readers searching for more McKinty titles to devour.
An unmissable thriller.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-53126-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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