Two women risk everything to leave their troubled lives behind.
In just a week, Claire Cook’s husband, Rory, will announce his campaign to be a U.S. senator from New York. No surprise there, since his family is chock full of high-profile politicians. As Rory’s wife, the poised and beautiful Claire seems to lead a charmed life, but it’s getting harder to hide the bruises under a carefully cultivated veneer of elegance. Claire tried to leave him once, an attempt that ended with cracked ribs. But this time, she’s ready. She’s been squirreling away cash, she’s secured a fake ID and passport, and a trip to Detroit will provide the perfect opportunity to make her escape. However, before Claire leaves for the airport, Rory decides to send her to Puerto Rico to meet with a humanitarian group instead of going to Detroit. Even worse, Rory goes to Detroit in her place and intercepts the package containing her cash and papers. At JFK, Claire, seemingly by chance, meets Eva, a grieving woman looking to make a new start after her husband’s death. Claire suggests that Eva take her flight to Puerto Rico, and Claire will head to Eva’s home in Berkeley, where she’ll attempt to slip into Eva’s life. After touching down, Claire learns that Eva’s plane crashed and Claire is presumed dead, but she’s not out of the woods yet. Claire cleverly set up a way to keep track of Rory’s messages to his head honcho, and when evidence suggests that Eva might not have actually been on that doomed plane, Claire's plans take on a new urgency and it’s revealed that Eva’s story masked a dark truth. Propulsive prose drives Clark’s tale of the intersecting lives of these two smart and resourceful women, and emphasis is placed on the importance of female friendship and support. Readers will surely find themselves hopelessly invested in Claire's and Eva’s ultimate fates.
A tense and engaging womancentric thriller.Pub Date: June 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-7282-1572-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Categories: THRILLER | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
11
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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. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Patterson and Ellis put their characters through hell in this hard-edged second installment of their Black Book series after The Black Book (2017).
A young girl is one of four people gunned down in a “very, very bad” K-Town drive-by shooting in Chicago. Police are under intense political pressure to solve it, so Detective Billy Harney is assigned to the Special Operations Section to put the brakes on the gang violence on the West Side. His new partner is Detective Carla Griffin, whom colleagues describe as “sober as an undertaker” and “as fun as a case of hemorrhoids.” And she looks like the last thing he needs, a pill popper. (But is she?) Department muckety-mucks want Harney to fail, and Griffin is supposed to spy on him. The poor guy already has a hell of a backstory: His daughter died and his wife committed suicide (or did she?) four years earlier, he’s been shot in the head, charged with murder (and exonerated), and helped put his own father in prison. (Nothing like a tormented hero!) Now the deaths still haunt him while he and Griffin begin to suspect they’re not looking at a simple turf war starring the Imperial Gangster Nation. Meanwhile, the captain in Internal Affairs is deep in the pocket of some bad guys who run an international human trafficking ring, and he loathes Harney. The protagonist is lucky to have Patti, his sister and fellow detective, as his one reliable friend who lets him know he’s being set up. The authors do masterful work creating flawed characters to root for or against, and they certainly pile up the troubles for Billy Harney. Abundant nasty twists will hold readers’ rapt attention in this dark, violent, and fast-moving thriller.
Top-drawer crime fiction. The authors are tough on the hero, but the hero is tough.Pub Date: March 29, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-49940-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
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