This sprawling family blood feud suffers from an abundance of improbable plot twists and contrivances.
Lehman’s debut novel introduces the Grants, a powerful Florida family whose superwealthy members are out for one another’s blood and money.
Stuart Grant, an office supply magnate, has a new trophy wife and is nefariously attempting to wrest total control of the family’s millions from his late brother’s family. So what if it violates the oath he and his brother swore in front of their mother years ago. Although his mother is still alive, and there is plenty of paperwork to back up the claim that the assets must be shared, Stuart will stop at nothing to steal from his brother’s widow and her children. Stuart has no positive qualities and extremely poor judgment. He recently married Eva, a master of artifice who, while lusting after other men, wants him only for his money. She becomes obsessed with Stuart’s handsome nephew, Michael, who is inconveniently smitten with Eva’s daughter, an intelligent, sincere woman completely unlike her mother. Stuart has also disowned his own son, William, because of William’s choice of life partner. Stuart’s secret plan is to expeditiously sell his company to a giant global office supply concern for nearly $2 billion, a deal necessitating both the destruction of all documents attesting to the ownership of stock by other family members and the falsifying of new documents naming him the sole owner. Increasingly desperate to stop his family from discovering his scheme, Stuart is forced to engage the services of hit men and women, leading to some very dire consequences. Most of the action takes place in the homes and grounds of the fabulously wealthy on their private island. This peek behind the curtains offers a look at how the .01 percent lives, providing the book’s most colorful, enjoyable renderings. The characters, however, are often caricatures—the gold digger, the murderous thug, the star-crossed lovers, etc.—while the language, particularly relating to love and sex, can be awkwardly florid. Take, for instance, a romantic moment under the stars: “A full moon led the heavens in a symphony of light.” The race to stop the big deal from coming to fruition turns into a screwball comedy of sorts; there’s even a hint of the film Some Like It Hot, which seems wildly out of place.
This sprawling family blood feud suffers from an abundance of improbable plot twists and contrivances.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 540
Publisher: Glades Press
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2014
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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