Baleful and scorching. No one in the suspense field today does nasty as well as Starr (The Follower, 2007, etc.).
The gunshots that defend a Forest Hills family from an intruder in their house touch off a powder keg as fatal for the family as for the burglar.
Even though his wife Dana has already dialed 911 and the police are on their way, Dr. Adam Bloom chooses to grab his Glock and confront the stranger his daughter Marissa warns him has broken in. Their face-off lasts only seconds. When it’s over, Adam’s ten-round clip is empty and career criminal Carlos Sanchez is dead. From that moment on, Adam expects everyone to treat him like a hero defending his home and family against the worst that could happen—even though there’s no evidence that Sanchez was carrying a weapon—and can’t understand why his wife and daughter are so horrified and the newspapers so bent on depicting him as a hot-tempered vigilante. But public relations are the least of the psychologist’s problems. Johnny Long, the old friend who’d agreed to back up Sanchez in the burglary, has fled the scene and vowed revenge. It’s not enough to kill Adam, he decides; he won’t be satisfied until he leaves all three Blooms dead and takes possession of everything they own. This turns out to be surprisingly easy, for the Blooms are a deeply dysfunctional family whose secrets Johnny has no trouble learning—especially after he begins dating Marissa—and exploiting to turn them against one another. Although Adam congratulates himself that “detecting abnormal behavior was his profession, after all,” he’s as imperceptive and as much in need of therapy as his wife and daughter. Even the self-styled Casanova who’s seduced his daughter is laughably obtuse about his own limitations. But that doesn’t stop him from wreaking high-intensity havoc on the Blooms.
Baleful and scorching. No one in the suspense field today does nasty as well as Starr (The Follower, 2007, etc.).Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-38706-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
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
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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