A paranormal thriller that’s sure to please both Hooper’s fans and those who like the genre.
Hooper’s latest in her Bishop/Special Crimes Unit series (Blood Ties, 2010, etc.) takes readers to a small North Carolina mountain town with the operatives of Haven.
Haven, the privately held pet project of a billionaire interested in psychic phenomena and crime fighting, sends its operative Jessie home to Baron Hollow, the town she fled 15 years earlier. When Jessie ran, she left behind her younger sister, Emma, and cold, reserved father. Since then, their father has died and Emma now runs the ancestral family home as an inn. But Jessie needs to return home in order to resolve exactly what sent her fleeing Baron Hollow in the first place. When she arrives, she and operative Nathan Navarro, a fellow psychic sent to back her up without her knowledge, each sense a dark presence in the town. Soon, Navarro turns up the body of a young woman in the wild mountains and hiking trails near the town, and there’s little doubt in Navarro’s mind that a serial killer is working in the area. Jessie has come to the same conclusion after seeing several ghosts bearing warnings. And even Emma, who has never openly admitted to a penchant for psychic ability, is uneasy and suffering from bad dreams in which she keeps seeing young women brutalized and murdered. Before long, Jessie starts digging up painful past personal history and making waves in a town where everyone knows everyone and everyone knows everyone else’s business. And, while Jessie puzzles through to find an answer to all that’s tormenting her, the killer continues to target helpless young women who stumble into the Hollow. Hooper weaves an intricate and complicated story into a coherent plot with plenty of twists and turns, but the tale she tells is dark and sometimes difficult to read. There’s also an element of recklessness about Jessie’s personality and reactions to obvious danger that’s both discomfiting and unconvincing. However, Hooper is a good storyteller and manages to make it all seem believable.
A paranormal thriller that’s sure to please both Hooper’s fans and those who like the genre.Pub Date: July 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-425-25874-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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