A gripping and thoughtful psychological tale.
A thriller focuses on a family’s struggle to survive when a small town’s technology abruptly stops working.
At first it seems as if it’s just one car not starting. But soon, all the phones, electricity, radios, and internet suffer a power failure in the town of Harpursville, New York. The residents wonder if the outage has also affected the entire country—or even the whole world. Their theories range from sunspots and electromagnetic pulses to terrorist attacks (“To hear some tell it, the Russians, Chinese, or ISIS would be rolling in to enslave the good people of the US of A any minute”). Kevin Barton thinks the situation is likely temporary, while his wife, Monica, worries about their dwindling food supply. Her fear gnaws at her day and night. Monica becomes concerned about the family’s safety and survival, especially with her daughter’s beautiful best friend, Dina McCray, getting stranded at the Bartons’ house, eating their food, and taking up space. An attempt to walk Dina home goes awry, leaving Kevin feeling humiliated and making the girl’s stay permanent. As time passes and chaos starts to spread, one man steps up to coordinate the town’s response, his organizational approach deemed visionary by many, including Kevin. Then a request is made that tears Monica and Kevin apart, the former growing increasingly paranoid and the latter preparing to do everything he can to save his family. O’Handley’s novel is a tense literary thriller that skillfully examines the line between survival and decency, fear and safety, power and impotence. Kevin is an average man who must deal with a growing feeling of powerlessness throughout the story, while Monica takes the lead early on regarding the family’s safety. Their different psychological reactions to the events taking place send them in opposite directions while the townspeople’s restlessness mushrooms around them, adding further pressure on the family. It’s in the microcosm of the Bartons’ house that the insidious drama of the unknown versus the known plays out and is brilliantly developed until the fitting conclusion.
A gripping and thoughtful psychological tale.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Breaking Night Press
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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