A brutal, emotional thriller that earns its stripes.
In Bennington’s (Reunion, 2011, etc.) latest supernatural thriller, Detective Rick Burns has spent a lot of years on the Indianapolis police force, but he’s never seen anything like this.
When a man is found gruesomely murdered in his own home, it’s just another case in a two-year streak of unsolved homicides afflicting the Indiana capital. One more case, one more headache for the troubled detective. Without any clues, leads or anything to link the cases together—except for the particularly brutal ways they were carried out—it’s getting to be more than Rick can handle. Propping him up are his father—a retired cop moonlighting as the station’s janitor—and Rick’s plucky sister-in-law, Stella. Together, they form a pretty good support group, or so they think. What they don’t realize is that they’re half of Rick’s problem: Rick promised his late older brother, Roger, that he wouldn’t let Stella remarry a cop; that’s getting to be a problem, seeing as Rick is falling in love with her. And while it’s nice to have Pops nearby for help when the going gets tough, Rick’s dad is just as likely to remind him that his brother was a better detective. Pops has a point; Rick is often willing to let good police work and common sense take a backseat for the sake of dramatic plot twists. Although that unprofessionalism makes it hard to strictly classify the book as a gumshoe novel, it doesn’t make it any less compelling as a mystery—thanks, in particular, to the appearance (and subsequent disappearance) of a young boy. Rick spots the pale, sickly youth at the scene of the latest crime. Driven by the desperation of only having one lead, Rick decides to follow it, no matter where. Bennington’s simple yet forceful style will keep readers guessing as the investigation takes Rick from the clean streets of Circle City to the darkest corners of the human heart. The truth leads Rick to places he never would have expected—and to questions he might not want answered.
A brutal, emotional thriller that earns its stripes.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-1467991063
Page Count: 298
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An impressive and surprising take on war-story tropes.
A doughboy makes a curious discovery at the front in this inventive metaphysical horror tale.
This novel by Kraus centers on Private Cyril Bagger, a U.S. soldier during World War I and the son of a bishop who died on the Lusitania; he’s taken his father’s Bible with him into the Army as a remembrance. He’s also a confidence man and shirker relegated to burial duty in the French countryside, which is fine with him: The work is grotesque (Kraus depicts wartime deaths in visceral detail) but keeps him from becoming a corpse himself. Alas, his commander has hand-picked him and four other “disreputable” soldiers for a suicide mission to rescue what sounds like an incessantly shrieking soldier. Cyril finds the source of the shrieking, which turns out to be—well, that’s tricky. Cyril sees her as a vaguely familiar woman, clothed in red and blue, bathed in bright light, and capable of magically rescuing him from the worst of German gunfire; members of his cohort see a mother, a former lover, and other women. So for the purposes of Kraus’ novel, the shrieker is a metaphor for the ways war stands in contrast to our deepest needs for care and safety. It’s a sweet sentiment, albeit one that Kraus coats in a lot of ugliness, particularly the seemingly endless human carnage. Kraus structures the novel as an extended run-on sentence (with paragraph breaks), giving the story a relentless and intense rhythm. As a veteran horror writer, he’s gifted at depictions of blood and guts and knows how to keep a story moving, but in its latter stages the novel is a philosophical one as well, concerned with humanity’s seemingly inborn need to wage war and what might counter it. The identity of the woman Cyril calls an angel is vague, but Kraus has a clear grasp on our worst impulses.
An impressive and surprising take on war-story tropes.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781668068458
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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