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
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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