A dark and impressive murder tale.
This thriller places a newspaper reporter in the thick of a small town’s grisliest crime.
The residents don’t lock their doors in the Austin County town of Failey. On the night before Halloween, Lotty Nusbaumer babysits Emily Russell, 11; her brother, Kyle, 9; and Timothy Crawford, 10. Aunt Lotty, as generations of neighbors have come to know her, has the kids making Halloween decorations in her double-wide trailer. Then someone enters. That someone shoots Lotty and the children, leaving them to bleed out. Deputy Amos “Moze” T. Beard is eating breakfast at Hack’s diner with Mirror-Press reporter Ambrose Clay when he’s called to the crime scene. Clay joins him at the scene, the initial sight of which causes 21-year-old Moze to toss his breakfast. Against police protocol, Clay enters the trailer, noting details such as a .22 rifle jammed and bent into the toilet. As cops and bystanders arrive, the reporter follows a wooded ridge to the police-taped property of Orlo Ratliff. The elderly man’s home is where Lotty, the only survivor of the shooting, stumbled for help. Days after the crime, Clay is unable to locate Lotty for an interview. Instead he must contend with Naomi Crawford, Timothy’s spotlight-hungry mother; Potter Crandall, a no-nonsense prosecutor who warns Clay against compromising the investigation; and Janelle S. Wheeler, a younger reporter from the Chronicle, a larger paper. And as if Clay needed a meatier case to gnaw on, he receives a chilly call from an individual who’s “very disappointed” to learn that Aunt Lotty lives. In this pugnacious Midwestern thriller, Gastineau (The Judge’s Brief, 2017) takes readers to 1994, the middle of a decade filled with vicious headline-makers like Theodore “the Unabomber” Kaczynski and serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Clay, an overweight, recovering alcoholic, muses about the crime: He had “entertained some previously unrealized hope of leaving this kind of thing behind in Chicago,” where he learned reporting. The author’s characters spar verbally at every turn, and his dialogue should be delicious to those readers who savor carefully portioned details. Orlo says that he and Lotty are lovers, but “I ain’t s’posed to show up” at her trailer “till it’s good and goddamned dark.” The novel’s title refers to the notion that, as reporters, “if you must have an opinion about the facts...use the fourth person: find a source and make them say it.” Clay’s dealings with interviewees are quite slippery, and his constant jousting against law enforcement regarding what information can be released is so entertaining that the criminal trial portion of the narrative feels like a bonus. Events move organically, and Gastineau’s work feels akin to classics like Helter Skelter and In Cold Blood. An aura of moral rot is captured by a witness on the stand: “Throughout her direct testimony, her expression was dreamy....She was a Jonestown girl; she’d drink the Kool-Aid and ask for more.” While the case drifts slightly here and there, readers should eagerly follow Clay’s heavy step.
A dark and impressive murder tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 455
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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