While the story is more than satisfying for fans of the historical conspiracy game, Reading brings more nuance, substance...
A struggling writer and a mysterious assassin take opposing sides in a race to discover a lost prophecy.
This European bestseller by Nostradamus expert Reading (The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus, 2009, etc.) delves deep into the history of the famous French seer. But the novel’s literary merit and historical assessment don’t come at the cost of suspense and action. The novel opens in Paris, where Reading’s fictional doppelgänger—American writer Adam Sabir—is chasing down a flimsy Internet lead. A gypsy con artist and drug addict named Babel is teasing Sabir that he has possession of the lost prophecies of Michel de Nostradame, who completed 942 out of a planned 1,000 quatrains of his predictions. But before Sabir can ferret out the truth, the gypsy slices open his hand and marks Adam’s head with a bloody print. Following Babel’s mysterious clues—“Two words. Remember them. Samois. Chris.”—Sabir makes his way to Samois-sur-Seine, where he meets the Manouche gypsy tribe that protects their own. Babel, meanwhile, has been brutally murdered by the villainous Achor Bale, an assassin trained by his mother to protect the history that Nostradamus predicted. His mysterious organization is Corpus Maleficus, a cult trying to protect a Third Antichrist, a malevolent figure following Napoleon and Hitler. Hot on the trail of both is Joris Calque, a veteran police officer who’s trying to flush out the American fugitive and the body count from marking all of Europe. In a fascinating and tense exchange, Sabir is forced to undergo a risky gypsy trial called a Kriss, after which he finds himself responsible for Yola Semana, Babel’s unmarried sister. Together, Yola and Sabir head out across Europe to ferret out clues from a series of Black Madonna statues located in Europe’s most exotic cities, all while fleeing the deadly advances of Achor Bale.
While the story is more than satisfying for fans of the historical conspiracy game, Reading brings more nuance, substance and action to his well-told tale than one might expect.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-64379-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
A top-notch psychological thriller.
In Hoag’s (The 9th Girl, 2013, etc.) latest, talented young newscaster Dana Nolan is left to navigate a psychological maze after escaping a serial killer.
While recuperating at home in Shelby Mills, Indiana, Dana meets her former high school classmates John Villante and Tim Carver. Football hero Tim is ashamed of flunking out of West Point, and now he’s a sheriff’s deputy. After Iraq and Afghanistan tours, John’s home with PTSD, "angry and bitter and dark." Dana survived abduction by serial killer Doc Holiday, but she still suffers from the gruesome attack by "the man who ruined her life, destroyed her career, shattered her sense of self, damaged her brain and her face." What binds the trio is their friend Casey Grant, who's been missing five years, perhaps also a Holiday victim, even if "[t]he odds against that kind of coincidence had to be astronomical." Hoag’s first 100 pages are a gut-wrenching dissection of the aftereffects of traumatic brain injury: Dana is plagued by "[f]ear, panic, grief, and anger" and haunted by fractured memories and nightmares. "Before Dana had believed in the inherent good in people. After Dana knew firsthand their capacity for evil." Impulsive and paranoid, Dana obsesses over linking Casey’s disappearance to Holiday, with her misfiring brain convincing her that "finding the truth about what had happened to Casey [was] her chance of redemption." But then Hoag tosses suspects into the narrative faster than Dana can count: Roger Mercer, Dana’s self-absorbed state senator stepfather; Mack Villante, who left son John with "no memories of his father that didn’t include drunkenness and cruelty"; even Hardy, the hard-bitten, cancer-stricken detective who investigated Casey’s disappearance. Tense, tightly woven, with every minor character, from Dana’s fiercely protective aunt to Mercer’s pudgy campaign chief, ratcheting up the tension, Hoag’s narrative explodes with an unexpected but believable conclusion.
A top-notch psychological thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95454-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Not his best, but a spooky pleasure for King’s boundless legion of fans.
Horrormeister King (End of Watch, 2016, etc.) serves up a juicy tale that plays at the forefront of our current phobias, setting a police procedural among the creepiest depths of the supernatural.
If you’re a little squeamish about worms, you’re really not going to like them after accompanying King through his latest bit of mayhem. Early on, Ralph Anderson, a detective in the leafy Midwestern burg of Flint City, is forced to take on the unpleasant task of busting Terry Maitland, a popular teacher and Little League coach and solid citizen, after evidence links him to the most unpleasant violation and then murder of a young boy: “His throat was just gone,” says the man who found the body. “Nothing there but a red hole. His bluejeans and underpants were pulled down to his ankles, and I saw something….” Maitland protests his innocence, even as DNA points the way toward an open-and-shut case, all the way up to the point where he leaves the stage—and it doesn’t help Anderson’s world-weariness when the evil doesn’t stop once Terry’s in the ground. Natch, there’s a malevolent presence abroad, one that, after taking a few hundred pages to ferret out, will remind readers of King’s early novel It. Snakes, guns, metempsychosis, gangbangers, possessed cops, side tours to jerkwater Texas towns, all figure in King’s concoction, a bloodily Dantean denunciation of pedophilia. King skillfully works in references to current events (Black Lives Matter) and long-standing memes (getting plowed into by a runaway car), and he’s at his best, as always, when he’s painting a portrait worthy of Brueghel of the ordinary gone awry: “June Gibson happened to be the woman who had made the lasagna Arlene Peterson dumped over her head before suffering her heart attack.” Indeed, but overturned lasagna pales in messiness compared to when the evil entity’s head caves in “as if it had been made of papier-mâché rather than bone.” And then there are those worms. Yuck.
Not his best, but a spooky pleasure for King’s boundless legion of fans.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8098-9
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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