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
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.
The master of modern horror returns with a loose-knit parapsychological thriller that touches on territory previously explored in Firestarter and Carrie.
Tim Jamieson is a man emphatically not in a hurry. As King’s (The Outsider, 2018, etc.) latest opens, he’s bargaining with a flight attendant to sell his seat on an overbooked run from Tampa to New York. His pockets full, he sticks out his thumb and winds up in the backwater South Carolina town of DuPray (should we hear echoes of “pray”? Or “depraved”?). Turns out he’s a decorated cop, good at his job and at reading others (“You ought to go see Doc Roper,” he tells a local. “There are pills that will brighten your attitude”). Shift the scene to Minneapolis, where young Luke Ellis, precociously brilliant, has been kidnapped by a crack extraction team, his parents brutally murdered so that it looks as if he did it. Luke is spirited off to Maine—this is King, so it’s got to be Maine—and a secret shadow-government lab where similarly conscripted paranormally blessed kids, psychokinetic and telepathic, are made to endure the Skinnerian pain-and-reward methods of the evil Mrs. Sigsby. How to bring the stories of Tim and Luke together? King has never minded detours into the unlikely, but for this one, disbelief must be extra-willingly suspended. In the end, their forces joined, the two and their redneck allies battle the sophisticated secret agents of The Institute in a bloodbath of flying bullets and beams of mental energy (“You’re in the south now, Annie had told these gunned-up interlopers. She had an idea they were about to find out just how true that was"). It’s not King at his best, but he plays on current themes of conspiracy theory, child abuse, the occult, and Deep State malevolence while getting in digs at the current occupant of the White House, to say nothing of shadowy evil masterminds with lisps.
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-1056-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
A mind-bending mystery, an insightful exploration of parent-child relationships, and a cautionary tale about bitterness and...
A young man seeking catharsis probes old wounds and unleashes fresh pain in this expertly crafted stand-alone from Edgar finalist Gaylin (If I Die Tonight, 2018, etc.).
Quentin Garrison is an accomplished true-crime podcaster, but it’s not until his troubled mother, Kate, fatally overdoses that he tackles the case that destroyed his family. In 1976, teenagers Gabriel LeRoy and April Cooper murdered 12 people in Southern California—Kate’s little sister included—before dying in a fire. Kate’s mother committed suicide, and her father withdrew, neglecting Kate, who in turn neglected Quentin. Quentin intends for Closure to examine the killings’ ripple effects, but after an interview with his estranged grandfather ends in a fight, he resolves to find a different angle. When a source alleges that April is alive and living in New York as Renee Bloom, Quentin is dubious, but efforts to debunk the claim only uncover more supporting evidence, so he flies east to investigate. Renee’s daughter, online film columnist Robin Diamond, is preoccupied with Twitter trolls and marital strife when Quentin calls to inquire about her mom’s connection to April Cooper. Robin initially dismisses Quentin but, upon reflection, realizes she knows nothing of Renee’s past. Before she can ask, a violent home invasion hospitalizes her parents and leaves Robin wondering whom she can trust. Artfully strewn red herrings and a kaleidoscopic narrative heighten tension while sowing seeds of distrust concerning the characters’ honesty and intentions. Letters from April to her future daughter written mid–crime spree punctuate chapters from Quentin's and Robin’s perspectives, humanizing her and Gabriel in contrast with sensationalized accounts from Hollywood and the media.
A mind-bending mystery, an insightful exploration of parent-child relationships, and a cautionary tale about bitterness and blame.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-284454-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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