Full of red herrings, exciting locations, and meddling strangers, this multifaceted mystery shows how mishaps happen when...
When an accidental death becomes an obsession, a grieving mother takes the law into her own hands in this novel.
Lacy Brogdon has gone by many names: Lacy Larson, Marilyn Little, and most recently Olivet Wendell. Using a fake ID, the former Mrs. Wendell takes her husband’s money and flees to New York, determined to track down Orella Bookings, the woman who killed her son in a hit-and-run accident years ago but was never caught. In short, punchy chapters, the hunt takes place between July 25 and Aug. 4, 2008, and follows multiple characters to Miami, New York City, Las Vegas, and Peach Grove, Georgia. Orella has never met Lacy, but she already knows she’s in her cross hairs. Her friend Kathy Stockton—along with a team of police officers, a computer expert, and a private detective—was in the middle of investigating Lacy for a murder when she learned of her plan. But crafty Lacy always seems to be one step ahead of them. The large cast of characters is slightly unwieldy, but the players connect in surprising ways—from Grover Crawley, a coldhearted pimp, to Celestine North, a party girl whose catchphrase is “I’ll never go south on you, baby”—and eventually they lead to Lacy. Not all of the characters are likable in Allis’ (A Moving Screen, 2016, etc.) lively tale, but they are complex: Rajha, a mysterious hit man with no last name, learned to kill from his abusive foster father. Rochester Miller, acting chief medical examiner, has a porn habit and a chip on his shoulder but is surprisingly reverent toward the bodies he examines. Even Lacy has a soft side—her love for her son blinds her to his serious flaws, and she uses her Christian faith to justify her actions. And Orella always seems to have a drink in her hand, even when she knows she needs to keep her wits about her, which gives her more depth.
Full of red herrings, exciting locations, and meddling strangers, this multifaceted mystery shows how mishaps happen when there’s more than one plan.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 319
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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