Nance strives for no style like that of the early Richard Bach in Stranger to the Ground or of Ernest K. Gann in Fate Is the...
Mixing white-knucklers (Headwind, 2001, etc.) with the occasional near-miss (Turbulence, 2002, etc.), Nance now takes up fighting the wildfires that yearly send up hundred of homes in flame.
Turbulence, in its attempt to fashion the first passenger airline mutiny in history, presented readers with a flight attendant from hell and the looniest pilot since Leslie Nielsen, and forced its story into outrageous inconsistencies. As if to avoid such bent plotting, Nance now abandons the high and the mighty, gets straightforward and down to earth—although massive hysteria and some really bad guys do arise. Living legend and womanizing Jeff Maze has for years flown for Jerry Stein’s fleet of DC-5B, 45-year-old air tankers out of West Yellowstone, planes that need a whole winter’s repair after the way they get beat up during firefighting season. But Misty Ryan, Jeff’s lover of 12 years, knows Jeff’s been acting strange. Jerry Stein has brought Clark Maxwell out of a four-year retirement as a fire-retardant dropper. Jerry’s in a panic because the government may shut him down and itself take over firefighting, while Clark worries that after 17 years of dropping retardant from these worn-out planes, fate—statistically—is hunting him down. So he’s back low-dropping slurry through hellish canyons of smoke plumes, superheated air, and exploding trees. Nance rises quickly into danger mode as Clark finds half of his flight panel inoperable and fuel gauges unreliable. Then accidents in the tanker fleet multiply. What’s causing these disasters—and what’s Jeff Maze got to do with it? And why does Jerry Stein squirm when Clark demands that he fly as copilot in Clark’s rusty Tanker 88?
Nance strives for no style like that of the early Richard Bach in Stranger to the Ground or of Ernest K. Gann in Fate Is the Hunter—in fact, the writing here at first feels hacked out and thriller-thin before it rises to blazing excitement.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-5050-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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