This addictive page-turner offers an ugly vision of American soullessness but also leaves room for hope.
In Harper’s darkest noir yet, powerful white men—some amoral, some immoral, and some purely evil—run amok in Los Angeles.
The basic message of this stand-alone sequel to Everybody Knows (2023) is that power corrupts. Harper’s wild prose and allusions to the likes of Samson and “war between the gods” raise tawdry situations to mythic, biblical proportions. In a plot revolving around noirish tropes of sex, money, and murder, the extremes of bad behavior displayed by the famous and the uber-rich are repellent, shocking, and frighteningly familiar. Expect a serial killer called the “LA Ripper” whose female victims are mutilated and worse, sexual deviance without boundaries, even cannibalism. Also expect masked thugs cruising the city in black SUVs, criminality covered up by law enforcers, and a pedophile whose death by suicide in a jail cell seems suspicious. The author’s rage seethes eloquently through characters whose lives are “crazy and electric and hollow.” Jake Deal, who earns a living covering the “brutalities and savage nights” of LA for his podcast, Creepy Crawl, is hired by an anonymous blackmailer to get dirty visuals of a list of rich and/or famous men. Up until recently, Kara Delgado has loved the fast-lane lifestyle offered by her job at Sub Rosa, a high-end concierge service, but that pleasure fizzled when Phoebe Butterfield, her co-worker and best friend, disappeared four months ago. Paranoia sets in when she notices that the four Ripper victims look a lot like brown-haired, green-eyed Phoebe and realizes the killer must be a Sub Rosa client. After rich pedophile Eric Algar’s death, his lawyer, Doug Gibson, finds he knows too much about a storage unit filled with incriminating evidence Algar gathered about his even more perverted pals. Jake, Kara, and Doug have lost their integrity, but working together to find the “Ripper,” they begin rediscovering their humanity. Whether they succeed, spiritually or practically, is the question.
This addictive page-turner offers an ugly vision of American soullessness but also leaves room for hope.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780316458405
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
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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