Keen comedy redeems an overly congested—albeit, briskly paced—murder plot.
A debut novel offers a hard-boiled detective story, punched up with some witty repartee—and sexual tension—between investigative partners.
Helene Stoner, a young, troubled girl, turns up dead at the Port Authority Terminal in New York City, mysteriously murdered. Her estranged father, Harcourt T. Stoner, an affluent baron of business, recruits two private investigators, Jessica Horowitz and Matt Redman, to find the killer. Autopsy results reveal that Helene gave birth to a child, and Harcourt wants them to track the kid down as well, if he or she remains alive. Meanwhile, Redman, a computer security expert, helps the IRS determine the source of a corrosive virus running rampant through its technology. The pair uncover a connection between Helene and Estella Malkin, a psychologically unhinged contract killer, who unfortunately dies before she can disclose any useful information. But Horowitz and Redman discover that Estella had donated significant sums of money to a charitable organization called Helping Hand Home, which provides assistance to erstwhile prostitutes and wayward girls. This leads them to a cultish organization in New Hampshire run by a charismatic leader, whose mission in life seems to be to prey upon vulnerable young women. The two parallel stories—the murder of Helene and the virus decimating IRS computers—finally converge in an unpredictable twist. It’s remarkable how much is packed into what is essentially a novella, but the price of unpredictability is a plot riddled with convolution and implausibility. The banter between the two protagonists can be genuinely sharp and funny, highlighting the barely suppressed romantic magnetism. They form an unlikely pair—she’s a Jewish ex-cop and he’s a black military veteran—but their chemistry is palpable. The dialogue sometimes reads like a parody of old pulp fiction mysteries, overwritten and excessively cute: “ ‘Freeze,’ Boris snapped. Matt was still trying to look up her tank top. ‘Or do you vant to choin your spirit friend, Zimru?’ Boris’ face did not inspire chumminess. Neither did the gun in his hand. She froze.” The pace is unyielding, and the authors manage to turn grim topics—murder and the systematic exploitation of young women—into fodder for comedy. This is a fun, if uninspired, iteration of a shopworn genre.
Keen comedy redeems an overly congested—albeit, briskly paced—murder plot.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 225
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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