A spooky, suspenseful supernatural thriller.
A New York City transplant moves into a coastal Maine home with a dark past in this debut mystery.
Sabrina “Bri” Hall was a project manager for Restart, a real estate developer in New York City. She was engaged to her project partner, Ryan Grady, but when she discovered that he’d cheated on her with her maid of honor, she cut her ties, vacationed in Maine to try to cure her blues, and impulsively bought a home on Jackel’s Head Point, which was rumored to have a haunted past. But when she begins to renovate the home, she needs some assistance. She meets handyman Matt, a skilled ex-farm boy from Iowa who now lives on the sea in his boat, the Audrey Natalia. As their relationship grows and their business partnership blossoms into a romance, Bri begins having nightmares; in them, she assumes the perspective of a previous inhabitant of the house, and their events provide insight into the murder-suicide that occurred there years ago. The history of the previous occupants unfolds not only in Bri’s nightmares but also in a journal that she discovers, and its insidious narrative of asylums, shipwrecks, plantations, and soul-snatching leads Bri to realize the house’s haunting never ceased. The book’s long prelude, regarding Ryan and his affair, could have been cut altogether from the narrative, but the premise of the haunted coastal home with a creepy lighthouse couldn’t make for better mystery fodder. Bri, Matt, and the ghostly presences that continue to inhabit the home are all fully rounded characters with engaging scenes. Labbee expertly crafts the venomous villain of Jackel’s Head Point while also managing to transport the reader into a story involving slave ships and the Caribbean, all without skipping a beat. However, the ending falls short of answering all of the many questions that come up in the last 50 pages or so.
A spooky, suspenseful supernatural thriller.Pub Date: July 23, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 338
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2017
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
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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