You’ll be up all night reading, but you’ll hate yourself in the morning.
A serial killer confounds a small Florida town already burdened with a complacent sheriff, a surgically enhanced Jezebel and a high school peopled by the usual mean girls, hapless faculty and Neanderthal jocks.
In Fielding’s latest mélange of suburban dread and mortal jeopardy (Lost, 2003, etc.), the main theater of action is a high school in Torrance, a sleepy town near Florida’s Alligator Alley. Rochester, N.Y., transplant Sandy Crosbie gamely teaches senior English while the popular girls yawn and the jocks in the back row heckle class fat girl Delilah. Sandy herself recoils at Delilah, daughter of Kerri, the siliconed, lipo-ed, lip-plumped siren who lured Sandy’s estranged hubby, Dr. Ian Crosbie, via Internet, to move Sandy, daughter Megan and son Tim down to this backwater. Ian’s not the first. Sheriff John Weber has intermittently succumbed to Kerri’s charms, escaping his sharp-tongued wife, Pauline, and anorexic daughter Amber. When mean girl Liana disappears, Weber fears the worst: Candy, a runaway teen, had vanished four months before. A “Killer’s Journal” excerpt every few chapters reveals that the murderer is targeting “heartstoppers”—i.e., airheads both pretty and cruel. Candy and Liana were chloroformed, brought to the basement of an abandoned, isolated house and eventually shot, with no sexual component. Liana’s body is discovered in a swampy, shallow grave by jocks Joey and Greg, members of a search party. Likely suspects include known wife-beater Cal from California, drama coach Mr. Lipsman, a cat-loving, never-was actor who casts Megan and Greg in his production of Kiss Me Kate, and creepy science teacher Mr. Peterson. Sandy pines for Ian’s repentant return, worries about Megan going too far with Greg and takes some foolish risks of her own while imbibing green-apple martinis. Although the narrative is compulsively readable, the mystery cheats by banishing crucial facts from the consciousness of point-of-view characters. The closing twist relies on readers’ gender assumptions.
You’ll be up all night reading, but you’ll hate yourself in the morning.Pub Date: April 3, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-9598-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
The plot is absurd, of course, but the book is a definitive pleasure. Prepare to be absorbed—and in more ways than one.
Another Brown (Inferno, 2013, etc.) blockbuster, blending arcana, religion, and skulduggery—sound familiar?—with the latest headlines.
You just have to know that when the first character you meet in a Brown novel is a debonair tech mogul and the second a bony-fingered old bishop, you’ll end up with a clash of ideologies and worldviews. So it is. Edmond Kirsch, once a student of longtime Brown hero Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist–turned–action hero, has assembled a massive crowd, virtual and real, in Bilbao to announce he’s discovered something that’s destined to kill off religion and replace it with science. It would be ungallant to reveal just what the discovery is, but suffice it to say that the religious leaders of the world are in a tizzy about it, whereupon one shadowy Knights of Malta type takes it upon himself to put a bloody end to Kirsch’s nascent heresy. Ah, but what if Kirsch had concocted an AI agent so powerful that his own death was just an inconvenience? What if it was time for not just schism, but singularity? Digging into the mystery, Langdon finds a couple of new pals, one of them that computer avatar, and a whole pack of new enemies, who, not content just to keep Kirsch’s discovery under wraps, also frown on the thought that a great many people in the modern world, including some extremely prominent Spaniards, find fascism and Falangism passé and think the reigning liberal pope is a pretty good guy. Yes, Franco is still dead, as are Christopher Hitchens, Julian Jaynes, Jacques Derrida, William Blake, and other cultural figures Brown enlists along the way—and that’s just the beginning of the body count. The old ham-fisted Brown is here in full glory (“In that instant, Langdon realized that perhaps there was a macabre silver lining to Edmond’s horrific murder”; “The vivacious, strong-minded beauty had turned Julián’s world upside down”)—but, for all his defects as a stylist, it can’t be denied that he knows how to spin a yarn, and most satisfyingly.
The plot is absurd, of course, but the book is a definitive pleasure. Prepare to be absorbed—and in more ways than one.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-51423-1
Page Count: 461
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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