A heartbreaking yet hopeful drama that unflinchingly confronts the trauma endured by so many women in the military.
A wounded army sergeant proves her resiliency in the face of violence, sexism, and distrust in this thriller.
Wemlinger prefaces his fictional story with true accounts from his time as an Army captain. He watched dozens of women face discrimination, harassment, and abuse at the hands of the countless men who surrounded them; now, 50 years later, this treatment continues. The young woman in question is 22-year-old Sergeant Rebecca Farnsworth, who works on the night shift at First Battalion headquarters. While performing a routine security check, Rebecca is violently assaulted and drugged. When Rebecca awakens, she stands “accused of dereliction of duty and drug use.” With a fierce women’s rights attorney by her side and tenacity in her heart, Rebecca fights tooth and nail to claim both her freedom and her innocence. This realistic novel spans nearly 20 years of Rebecca’s life; in that time, her family is lost and then regained, her heart is shattered and then mended, and her career is crushed and then reborn. At the same time, the author also allows readers into the unbalanced minds of several other complex, damaged, or truly vile characters, such as a serial rapist and the detectives determined to catch him. These taut threads weave together to create a novel that’s courtroom drama, crime thriller, and love story all in one. Wemlinger has constructed a well-plotted story with a clear sense of purpose that’s brimming with themes of resilience, hope, and justice. A range of complex topics—rape, abortion, gender discrimination, and an unjust judicial system, to name a few—are handled in a way that’s accessible to a general readership. Wemlinger vows that readers “will experience, through the eyes of one young woman, the time, trouble, and perseverance” it took to bring change to the world one step at a time.
A heartbreaking yet hopeful drama that unflinchingly confronts the trauma endured by so many women in the military.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781968761349
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Mission Point Press
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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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