Urban fantasy fans should savor this confident series opener that questions the writer-character relationship.
A fictional private investigator becomes drawn into his own author’s world in this novel.
Detroit author Calista Amberson has written 20 novels in the Raven Tales series. Her protagonist, paranormal private eye Bram Farrell, has been awaiting the next book from his fictional realm and even checks in on Calie through a portal in her muse’s office. One fateful night, the novelist, who’s also a witch, summons 43 moon goddesses. She then pulls Bram from his fictional Detroit into her real city, where he experiences a sensory overload. He also notices that Calie has a persistent cough. This is her late-stage cancer. While in the real world, Bram must find a talented young woman to continue writing his adventures when Calie is gone. But first, he explores Detroit with Beelzebub, a dachshund-shaped hellhound. In a rough, vampire-ruled neighborhood, he’s saved during a brawl by the succubi Kitsune, Doe, and Neko. On behalf of the supernatural community, Doe wonders “what The Raven’s appearance at this point in time foreshadows.” With Calie and her coven’s motives for bringing Bram into reality not quite trustworthy, the succubi task him with learning more, including whether or not the witches are responsible for the various nonhuman deaths that mirror the plots of the Raven Tales novels. In this first installment of a meta urban fantasy, Dane (Getting Rid of Murray, 2018, etc.) slathers on the silliness, thick and often. Readers learn, for example, that Bram “didn’t look anything like the guy pictured on the cover of any of the books. Sorta disappointed at that—he was a good-lookin’ guy.” Memorable characters aid and abet this agile narrative, like Ralph, the troll, and Samael, the devil himself. As Bram discovers connections between “real world” victims and Calie’s plots, readers become archaeologists among the layers of fiction. And Dane’s imagination leaves no doubt that the murdered yeti from Raven Tales Volume 19 would prove a captivating case—if readers could actually get their hands on it. Fabulous in its own right is the way Bram takes the reigns of identity from his author and solidifies this fresh concept for further escapades.
Urban fantasy fans should savor this confident series opener that questions the writer-character relationship.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 253
Publisher: Burns and Lea Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
