A suspense tale with an engrossing plot and fun characters.
In Brote’s thriller set in 1978, a pair of newlyweds move into a home that has more secrets than they bargained for.
As the story opens, Sharon Walsh is driving to Nettlestone, New Hampshire, to move into her new home with her husband, Kip, a local morning radio DJ. When Sharon arrives at the house, she learns that it’s next door to an abandoned Cloud 9 Family Fun Park. As Sharon gets accustomed to Nettlestone, she finds some secret compartments in her home as well as a cache of provocative photos and a diary; she also discovers the house’s previous residents were a woman named Astrid and her husband, Hank Russo, who allegedly strangled her a year ago but was never charged.In addition, she finds out that her icy neighbor, Dolores, used to live there. Despite being plagued by nightmares, Sharon investigates the mysteries surrounding Astrid’s murder, which seem connected to a secret swingers’ club. Later, she meets Astrid’s twin sister, Agnes; together, the two women decode the murder victim’s collection of postcards and uncover a hidden tunnel that leads directly from the house to Cloud 9. After someone else turns up dead, Sharon races to solve the mystery with new urgency. Brote’s tale is a riveting whodunit that has the added bonus of being a period piece, complete with a music playlist. The plot offers thrilling (and sometimes delightfully blue) twists and turns, and Brote manages to give her setting additional texture with 1970s references that feels as comfortable as a faded Eagles T-shirt. This provides a wonderful contrast to the skillfully described, creepy amusement park, which features a labyrinthine house of mirrors. Still, Brote effectively takes a beat every now and again to focus on Sharon and Kip’s relationship, allowing readers to become more invested in the characters. Similarly, the prose can be striking, as in the prologue: “I was able to inhale one shaky last breath, the intoxicating fragrance of rose and jasmine on my skin mingling with the stink of stale cigarette smoke and the marshy pond outside.”
A suspense tale with an engrossing plot and fun characters.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9798987693315
Page Count: 307
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A standout in the series.
The sixth adventure of Harvard symbology professor Robert Langdon explores the mysteries of human consciousness, the demonic projects of the CIA, and the city of Prague.
“Ladies and gentlemen...we are about to experience a sea change in our understanding of how the brain works, the nature of consciousness, and in fact…the very nature of reality itself.” But first—Langdon’s in love! Brown’s devoted readers first met brilliant noetic scientist Katherine Solomon in The Lost Symbol (2009); she’s back as a serious girlfriend, engaging the committed bachelor in a way not seen before. The book opens with the pair in a luxurious suite at the Four Seasons in Prague. It’s the night after Katherine has delivered the lecture quoted above, setting the theme for the novel, which features a plethora of real-life cases and anomalies that seem to support the notion that human consciousness is not localized inside the human skull. Brown’s talent for assembling research is also evident in this novel’s alter ego as a guidebook to Prague, whose history and attractions are described in great and glowing detail. Whether you appreciate or skim past the innumerable info dumps on these and other topics (Jewish folklore fans—the Golem is in the house!), it goes without saying that concision is not a goal in the Dan Brown editing process. Speaking of editing, the nearly 700-page book is dedicated to Brown’s editor, who seems to appear as a character—to put it in the italicized form used for Brownian insight, Jason Kaufman must be Jonas Faukman! A major subplot involves the theft of Katherine’s manuscript from the secure servers of Penguin Random House; the delightful Faukman continues to spout witty wisecracks even when blindfolded and hogtied. There’s no shortage of action, derring-do, explosions, high-tech torture machines, attempted and successful murders, and opportunities for split-second, last-minute escapes; good thing Langdon, this aging symbology wonk, never misses swimming his morning laps. Readers who are not already dyed-in-the-wool Langdonites may find themselves echoing the prof’s own conclusion regarding the credibility of all this paranormal hoo-ha: At some point, skepticism itself becomes irrational.
A standout in the series.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9780385546898
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
