An enthralling mystery with sublime characters.
In Bourgault’s debut mystery with SF/fantasy touches, a boy bonds with a mysterious girl and investigates a suspect in his mother’s unexplained disappearance.
Justin Lambert, a biracial tween in Ferguston, Ontario, hasn’t seen or heard from his mom in a decade. She went missing in 1996, and the cops found her abandoned car but had little else to go on. Now the 12-year-old boy learns for the first time that there’s long been a suspect in his Black mother’s apparent kidnapping: David Raymond, a career criminal and white supremacist. Justin learns all he can about Raymond, digging into the man’s files at the health center where he volunteers and where his mother had worked. This angers Raymond, who has no qualms about threatening a kid. Around the same time, Justin makes a new friend in Billie; she seems to be about 10, and she responds to questions evasively or cryptically. He eventually surmises that’s she’s from outside Ferguston—possibly very far outside—and that she may have strange abilities that could help him bring a criminal to justice. Bourgault’s story is largely ambiguous. Early discussions with Billie, for example, just leave Justin confused; she mentions a “collective” and bizarrely asks him, without specifics, “Are these the only colours you have?” Still, Billie is likable, rather than off-putting; her closeness with and trust in Justin is apparent early on. The equally appealing Justin displays intelligence and tenacity. The splendid supporting cast also includes Justin’s father, a white middle-school teacher; and his dad’s older, “authentic flower child” brother. The mystery of Justin’s mother will maintain readers’ interest, and her son unearths a few surprises during his investigation. Meanwhile, details about Billie are revealed slowly, and readers will have a much sharper picture of the delightfully odd girl by the novel’s end.
An enthralling mystery with sublime characters.Pub Date: March 13, 2020
ISBN: 9780228822837
Page Count: 331
Publisher: Tellwell Talent
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2022
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
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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