Bestselling horror writer Saul (The Homing, 1994, etc.) presents the serial killer you can't kill, even with 2,000 volts of electricity flooding through him for two minutes. When Seattle reporter Anne Jeffers attends the execution of Richard Kraven, she's given Kraven's last interview, during which the genius murdererwhose victims are numberlessswears he's innocent. Is it possible that Kraven was possessed by an evil entity, an entity passed into Kraven from his abusive father, who used electricity to torture Richard as a child? Author Saul does not spell it out completely, but when Kraven is electrocuted by the state, his soul leaps into the body of Anne Jeffers's architect husband Glen, who happens to die of a heart attack just then and is brought back to life. Kraven takes over Glen's mind and will ``prove'' to Anne that Richard Kraven was an innocent man. How? By performing new serial murders that, as before, leave a secret sign in the victims' pleural cavity, a pair of black lightning bolts, that only the police know about. At the same time, though, there's a copycat murderer abroad, who also eviscerates his victims as did Kraven. That turns out to be his very dumb brother Rory, whom Kraven murders along with their mother. Meanwhile, Anne gets gaslighted by threats that pop up on her computer, then disappear. Will Kraven/Glen murder her two children in his search for the Life Force? Well, there's no end to murder, since with a twinkle Saul indicates that even with the villain seemingly disposed of, the entityas in any number of taleslives on. Evil genius Kraven lacks the concrete weight on the page of Thomas Harris's serial killers, but no matter. However banal the plot, the suspense works, ensuring the readership of many. (Literary Guild alternate selection)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-449-90864-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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