A bracing crime story in which one mistake drags strangers into a violent descent.
In Johnson’s thriller, a velvet pouch of uncut diamonds sets some of Las Vegas’s slickest, most violent, and most desperate characters on a collision course.
Chaos sweeps the Vegas Strip when Skinny, an unhoused young man with a heroin habit, signs for a FedEx package containing uncut diamonds. The delivery is meant for Emmy, a jeweler trying to clean up his act even as he keeps handling stones tied to the Chicago Outfit’s stolen-gem pipeline. Skinny loses the gems in a nightclub where Cory, a teenage busboy and aspiring comedian, finds them and passes them to his boss, Deedee, who locks them in the club’s safe. Skinny’s “best friend” and petty thief Niven isn’t about to let this unforeseen stroke of luck slip through their fingers, but the mob has no intention of allowing their ill-gotten gains to slip away so easily, and Karol “the Swede” comes to Sin City to reclaim them. Yet by the time he arrives, the diamonds have disappeared like the queen in a corner game of three-card monte. Skinny ultimately flees into the flood tunnels under the city—the domain of the volatile Rat King, whose underground community of Vegas’s lost souls becomes the dingy staging ground for a violent confrontation between all unfortunate parties involved. Johnson structures the narrative out of sequence, building tension and intrigue while letting scenes jump forward and backward in time so readers can assemble the chain of events alongside the characters. (The ensemble cast of characters is large but never overwhelming.) Shifting viewpoints effectively build a street-level portrait of Las Vegas, where the games play out on tables but all the real business is done under them. The story relies heavily on addicted and unhoused characters to keep the diamonds in motion, and there are times when the use of their vulnerability and hardships as caper-fuel feels slightly exploitative. But while they’re not always handled with the utmost sensitivity, even characters like the Rat King never slip into parody, and the novel’s sharp pacing never flags.
A bracing crime story in which one mistake drags strangers into a violent descent.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2025
ISBN: 9798990035010
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Street Level Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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