An entertaining, richly textured suspense yarn with a spirited hero.
A one-legged private eye searches for a missing heiress while navigating mayhem on the mean streets of Portland, Maine, in this mystery.
This knotty first installment of the Dee Rommel series finds the fledgling shamus working at G&Z Investigations while on disability leave from the Portland Police Department after she was knocked off a roof by a perp and had her lower left leg amputated. She’s hired by local tech zillionaire Philip Claren to find his daughter, Lucy, a brainy, 20-something research scientist. Lucy’s gone off the grid just 10 days before her wedding to a young PR man named Tyler Peppard, whom Claren takes a dim view of. Assisted by her friend Jade, an IT whiz who can get into any encrypted file or database, Dee delves into the Claren clan’s underbelly. The excavation turns up Lucy’s rich, prickly mother; an Ecstasy-enabled, extortion-porn plot; and a sinister artificial intelligence company’s scheme to surveil people by implanting them with microchips. Dee also gets major subplots heaped on her plate. A liquor salesman who hit on her at a bar turns up dead, and she gets involved in another missing woman case when her hairdresser friend Karla Ackerman disappears. The latter riddle deepens when Dee finds Karla badly beaten in a motel and too traumatized to talk. Then, town terror Billy Payer, whom Dee and Karla testified against at his assault-and-battery trial, gets out of prison and pursues his calling of menacing everyone he comes across. Along the way, Dee fields romantic interest from canny police colleague Detective Robbie Donato and “the Reader,” a flirty knight errant who’s into motorcycles and Dickens novels.
Selbo’s busy plot creaks occasionally. The mystery’s mechanism sometimes needs people who have good reason to explain things to not explain them and others to give Dee notes clarifying things out of the blue when she’s clueless. But the narrative usually earns its keep with nifty, engrossing procedural, including Dee’s locomotion tactics—how she manages the complicated process of moving around and even climbing a tree with her prosthesis. (“I swing my good leg up and use my abs to lift the rest of my weight. Hurts like hell.”) The author grounds the story in an atmospheric portrait of a Portland divided between yuppified quaintness and working-class grit and where everyone has a shared past. Her characters are sharply etched by Dee’s always observant voice. (“The lights of the cameras hit two reflective points on” Tyler: “one on the excessive Rolex on his left wrist and the other on his shiny, pointy, steel-toed boots. He looks like an arrogant dickwad.”) In Selbo’s punchy, vivid prose, Dee is hard-boiled when she needs to be, but her injury gives her a vulnerability and interiority that deepen her. (“My goddamn leg thinks it’s whole again; the knee thinks it’s connected to a calf and ankle and foot—thinks it has muscles, tissue, fat, tendons, veins, arteries and bones all in place to keep blood flowing from my left extremity to my heart….Of course, I know it’s my brain dipping into the past; imagining the tickle of fresh sheets and the heat of a calloused hand stroking the length of my leg.”) Readers will root for her as she steps gamely into every peril.
An entertaining, richly textured suspense yarn with a spirited hero.Pub Date: July 31, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-95-062739-4
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Pandamoon Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
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
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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