A subdued but positively absorbing murder mystery.
In Williams’ debut thriller, a man plots to evade taxes by cheating a casino—a scheme that goes horribly wrong when someone ends up dead.
Millionaire businessman Burt Donaldson doesn’t like that the U.S. government takes nearly 40 percent of his yearly earnings, so he hatches a plot to trim the taxes he owes. He plans to fix a game of roulette at his Vegas casino: he’ll let a gambler win millions but afterward have the bulk of the winnings returned to himself. A few of Burt’s execs pick Aussie employee Jason Chard to play the lucky winner, as his memorization is solid—Burt makes sure to test his skills—and he and wife Debbie could duck away to their home country with their portion of the cash; Burt would then pick up his portion from Jason. The ruse works, but it seems that, weeks later in Australia, Jason is reluctant to part with any of the score. Burt travels to Australia to track down Jason but gets more than he bargained for—a murder rap to beat. Williams’ novel often reads like a soap opera, a thoroughly enjoyable one, with murder, mystery, sexual tension, and a double cross or two. Burt opens the story as the protagonist, but there’s also sufficient coverage of Jason while the roulette scheme is underway and of John Fix, vice president of administration, whose romance with assistant lawyer Jane Coe is tested when an envious John questions her frequent business meetings with Burt. For details, Williams is meticulous, which typically works in the novel’s favor, especially with regard to the laborious process of choosing the gambler: John, marketing VP Peter Rush, and attorney Bill Smythe take their time for the selection, which helps build suspense and exposes each man’s doubts about their boss’s plans. All of these plot points likewise lead to a big payoff at the end, and the novel caps off with a nice, effective twist. The excessive particulars, however, can sometimes be a bit much. For example, as Burt explains the scam to Jason at dinner, Jason eyes his meal and allows the narrative to turn into a superfluous lesson on how to eat French onion soup. Eventually, though, once Burt reaches Australia, the plot becomes wittily convoluted in a mystery that zigzags with glee.
A subdued but positively absorbing murder mystery.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491749081
Page Count: 272
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2015
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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