An undeniably powerful plot-pull—albeit a ruthless, bludgeoning sort of thing that produces sickish laughter as much as...
Like Critchon on overdrive, Brown’s debut is a grabber—almost too much so.
The TV reality-game show here isn’t lethal at first, but it becomes so when a techno-suave terrorist hijacks it. Here, reality shows like Survivor and Big Brother are waning due to negative sentiment after a contestant’s suicide on a show called True Life. 24/7, however, is set to buck the trend. Over seven weeks, twelve contestants are to go through the usual trials and manipulations while stranded on a Caribbean island with just themselves, the crew, and over six hundred mostly hidden cameras—for a prize of two million. The show has barely started, though, when the entire production crew is struck dead by an Ebola-like virus. The contestants, meanwhile, are informed by a disembodied voice calling itself “Control” that they must still play the game (even though they’ve all been infected with the same virus) and that an online audience will vote each day as to which contestant won’t get the daily vaccine needed for survival. The network immediately pulls the show, but the signal is still there, showing up on the Internet and other networks even as the contestants begin to die off. All of this happens hardly more than 20 pages in. The atmosphere of sadism is palpable throughout (“The surf lashed the beach like a Roman flogging a Christian”), and the paper-thin characters hardly get their names out before they’re dispatched with grisly glee. Brown, though—an NBC broadcast journalist by trade—must be commended for not overloading his pages with an insider’s hyperdetailed accounts of the media circus that erupts.
An undeniably powerful plot-pull—albeit a ruthless, bludgeoning sort of thing that produces sickish laughter as much as anything else.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-345-44697-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Ex–County Coroner Dr. Sara Linton does seem to be managing a break from her own Job-like sufferings, at least for this...
Still more proof, if any were needed, that the most monstrous demons in Grant County, Ga., are lurking in the master bedroom.
Faith Mitchell, of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, returns home late from a training seminar to find her house trashed, her baby daughter locked in the shed, a man lying dead on the laundry-room floor—Faith herself will kill two other intruders before they can escape, and a third corpse will turn up in the trunk of the family car—and her mother gone. Capt. Evelyn Mitchell was eased into retirement from the Atlanta PD years ago after her narcotics squad was implicated in a web of corruption. Two of her former colleagues are doing time; a third, former Det. Boyd Spivey, is on death row for murder. So it’s not all that surprising that gang-bangers would have broken into her house looking for a big score. But why are their surviving colleagues in Los Texicanos and the Yellow Rebels suddenly so determined to annihilate each other, and how does Evelyn’s abduction fit into the picture? “I think we must be caught in the middle of some kind of war,” Faith’s boss, GBI deputy director Amanda Wagner, tells Faith’s partner, endlessly troubled Will Trent. The mounting body count, however, pales beside the ferocious conflicts among regulars in this high-octane series (Broken, 2010, etc.). Faith’s brother Zeke, returning from an Air Force posting, instantly resumes his long feud with her. Will is alternately abused by Amanda Wagner and his spiteful wife Angie. And Faith’s climactic showdown with her mother’s abductor will reveal far more personal motives for the runaway mayhem than she ever could have imagined.
Ex–County Coroner Dr. Sara Linton does seem to be managing a break from her own Job-like sufferings, at least for this installment.Pub Date: June 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-345-52820-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A proficient, mounting-stakes actioner that proves Scottoline is just as comfortable with a shrink determined to go to the...
A sociopath targets a suburban Pennsylvania psychiatrist whose success is only the prelude to a series of nightmarish reversals.
It’s true that Dr. Eric Parrish doesn’t have everything. His wife, Caitlin, is divorcing him and being difficult over the joint custody they’ve arranged for their 7-year-old daughter, Hannah, and his latest private patient, 17-year-old Max Jakubowski, seems much more in need of help than his dying grandmother does. But Eric’s colleagues like and admire him—one of them, medical student Kristine Malin, is clearly in hot pursuit—and so does U.S. News and World Report, which is about to announce that the psych unit Eric heads at Havemeyer General Hospital ranks second in the nation. It all goes south with a suddenness that would be shocking outside the pages of Scottoline. Kristine files harassment charges after Eric rejects her come-on. Max phones Eric to say that his grandmother’s died and then takes a powder. Renée Bevilacqua, a girl Max tutors in math and otherwise worships from afar, gets murdered the morning after Eric follows her home, looking in vain for a lead to Max’s whereabouts. The cops haul Eric in as a person of interest, then invade his office and home looking for evidence when he demands they find Max, whom he considers a suicide risk, but won’t say any more about him. The colleagues who so recently toasted Eric lock him out. And that’s all before Max takes five teenagers hostage and announces that he’s going to kill one every 15 minutes before he blows up the King of Prussia Mall. Who can possibly be pulling so many different strings?
A proficient, mounting-stakes actioner that proves Scottoline is just as comfortable with a shrink determined to go to the wall for a troubled teen as she ever was with Bennie Rosato’s all-female law practice (Betrayed, 2014, etc.).Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-01011-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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