A crime drama that offers a winning combination of thrills, defeats, and hard-earned victories.
In Weber’s thriller, a Canadian Mountie from the northern tip of Nova Scotia confronts her unsettling past while investigating local disturbances with potentially international implications.
The hamlet of Meat Cove gets its name from the carcasses that marauding Vikings once tossed into the sea at the northern tip of Cape Breton. Fundy Sutherland, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, lives a complicated life there with her 16-year-old daughter, Skye, and her married lover, Pascal. She also has a secret past as a Canadian Armed Forces “sniper with kills on four continents.” Her cruel mother, Geneva, who had a temper that “could melt a Coke bottle,” ran off on Fundy’s fifth birthday, leaving her alone with an alcoholic, unemployed father. After a well-off local family with three boys took her in, Fundy became fiercely competitive, excelling in sports and winning the Junior National Championship in the biathlon. Skye’s latest school assignment, requiring an at-home DNA test, sends Fundy into panic mode, as it could reveal aspects of her life that she’d rather stay hidden. In addition, a criminal whom Fundy helped to put in prison six years ago has been released—and he appears headed for Meat Cove. Adding to her worries are sightings of two Venezuelan boats, which may be carrying drugs. Weber’s novel is populated with colorful, sharply drawn characters—especially Fundy, a no-nonsense cop who describes herself as “like Dudley Do-Right and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, but instead of a horse, I ride a Taurus. And I wear a bra.” Also of note is Snuki Finsterblast, Skye’s science teacher: “the only woman in Cape Breton with a worse name than mine” says Fundy, and who dyes her long gray hair “black, but only once a year.” The author also appealingly shows Fundy’s relationship with Pascal to be loving and physical, marked by mutual acceptance of occasional absences and divided loyalties. The story moves quickly, shifting back and forth in time, with much of Fundy’s past revealed through passages she writes to Skye, detailing a life that’s both harrowing and exhilarating.
A crime drama that offers a winning combination of thrills, defeats, and hard-earned victories.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2026
ISBN: 9781967458325
Page Count: -
Publisher: Seacoast Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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