Excellent writing and a clever plot make this one stand out.
Irish author Banville brings back characters he originally wrote about under the name Benjamin Black.
Banville’s latest 1950s-set crime novel opens with Denton Wymes, a recluse who lives in a caravan in rural Ireland with his dog, stumbling upon an unusual sight: a Mercedes SL idling in a field, its headlamps on and no driver in sight. A man named Armitage accosts Wymes, saying that his wife, who had been driving the car, has gone missing and may have “drowned herself.” Wymes is suspicious of Armitage, whose affect seems off: “It seemed a piece of bad acting, but then, Wymes told himself, that’s mostly how people behave when there’s a crisis and they’re distraught.” DI St John Strafford arrives from Dublin to investigate, quickly sussing out that nothing about the case will be straightforward—Armitage is slippery and unpredictable, Wymes is a convicted child molester, and something seems amiss about the couple whose rental house Armitage and Wymes went to for help. Meanwhile, Strafford has his own problems: His separated wife wants a divorce, and his lover—who happens to be the daughter of his pathologist colleague, Quirke—is pregnant. And when two bodies are discovered, he is faced with an increasing sense of urgency. Strafford and Quirke return as characters from Banville’s previous crime novels, and Armitage played a large role in his most recent book, The Lock-Up (2023). These are compelling people: Strafford with his emotional unavailability (“The fact was, he did not understand himself, or Phoebe, or anyone. The vagaries of the human heart baffled him”) and Quirke with his brooding depression (“He stayed away from people as much as possible. This was a loneliness company couldn’t cure”). As for the mystery at the heart of the book: Banville remains a master of suspense; it’s not easy to stop turning the pages until the novel’s genuinely surprising end. This is yet another fine thriller from an author at the top of his game.
Excellent writing and a clever plot make this one stand out.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781335000590
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
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
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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