by Jason Starr ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 5, 2012
Starr doesn’t let plot development or characterization impede the flow of violence or improbable twists and turns in this...
Jason Starr continues the saga of regular-guy-turned-werewolf that he began with The Pack (2011).
Women find Simon Burns irresistible. So much so that they practically yank his pants off while he’s out with his young son to enjoy a day in the park. But Simon’s conversion from an ordinary guy to a sexually magnetic stay-at-home dad with strange physical powers isn’t a coincidence. It all began when he turned into an urban werewolf courtesy of Michael, the strange German heir to a beer fortune. Simon’s wife, Alison, understands only that her husband suffers from some type of psychological disorder that makes him think he’s a werewolf, but Simon knows the truth, and he’s hidden it from her well. Or at least he’s tried, because lately his powers have been growing, and he’s becoming stronger, faster and more dangerous every day. As Alison grows more and more puzzled about her marriage and Simon’s weird behavior, Simon explores the werewolf side of his personality and discovers he can run faster and longer than ever before and sense smells like never before, all while experiencing amazing changes to his body. But Simon is worried about his family’s safety. He has seen firsthand the brutal appetite of werewolves in a feeding frenzy and worries that his own role in a police investigation led by a sexy female detective will soon bring much unwanted notice to him and the members of his pack. Not to mention that his own wife displays the critical judgment skills of a teenage girl who goes down in the basement knowing that there might be a guy with a hockey mask and a chainsaw waiting. Starr’s book is long on gore and rife with the kind of sexual thinking generally attributable to nerdy but hopeful 15-year-old boys, and none of Starr’s characters are especially redeeming, but there’s a goofy kind of fun to the writing.
Starr doesn’t let plot development or characterization impede the flow of violence or improbable twists and turns in this tale about a guy who parents by allowing his 3-year-old to hang out with people-eating werewolves.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-55-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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