A uniquely raw medical thriller brimming with perfect comedic timing.
In this fiction debut, disaster stalks a vacationing doctor, his family, and thousands of fellow cruise ship guests.
Dr. Martin Walker, podiatrist, has just embarked on a cruise out of Galveston, Texas. He and his family are on the 14-deck ship The Grand Decadence. The trip is meant to help Martin and his preteen daughter, Haley, spend some time together, as they’ve grown apart lately. His mother-in-law, Veronica Covington, hasn’t helped the situation, with her incessant commentary on Martin’s generous weight and supposed cowardice. The journey begins forbiddingly when the lobster dinner makes a guest named Linda violently ill. Martin helps Linda’s husband carry her to the infirmary, where he meets Dr. Floros. As a germophobe, Martin suspects more than indigestion and realizes the ship is understaffed to handle an outbreak of norovirus, or other easily communicable diseases. Meanwhile, Yegor Petrenko, CEO of the pharmaceutical company Petretech, watches The Grand Decadence from monitors in a secluded Alaskan village. He also follows the progress of Cindy, a tropical storm growing in the Gulf of Mexico. As more people become sick on the ship, Dr. Floros narrows the disease down to a parasite. She then notices that the parasite contains the DNA of two separate species, which, she tells Martin, “can't occur naturally. The odds against that happening are staggering.” Chambers infuses his novel with terrific dollops of medical science, wit, and bathroom humor (often literally), presenting audiences with a revenge blockbuster Stephen King would enjoy. Casual readers, however, should be warned that Chambers truly relishes crafting gross-out passages, including one at a buffet in which a vomiting woman “rotated from left to right as the torrent arced across the sneeze guards like a pressure wash.” Also impressive is the author’s pistonlike control over character development and pace; the better readers understand the horrendous Veronica and the odd Capt. Brooks, the faster they will turn pages to learn their fates. And because awful luck follows Martin throughout the ship (including fistfights and marital infidelity), know that the finale is a foul yet sublime missive to fans of raunch everywhere.
A uniquely raw medical thriller brimming with perfect comedic timing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 448
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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