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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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