Overly familiar debut melodrama somewhat redeemed by one fresh theme, the use of art therapy to overcome childhood mutism. Two poles of mental illness hold this novel in balance: the study of a sexual psychopath, and of the elective mutism he’s driven his stepson into through sexual abuse. Chet Boyce marries Davy’s plain-faced mother to get at seven-year-old Davy. When Davy tells her that his new stepfather has been hurting him “down there” and she confronts Chet, Chet kills her with a straight razor in front of Davy, then buries her, and takes Davy with him in a trailer to the far Oregon timberland town of Bentman. Chet, it turns out, is a serial murderer who marries and kills widows with sons. His threats have caused Davy to go mute, even around their trailer, which is parked in the woods. Not surprisingly, the boy does poorly in school, and so is later transferred to the Bentman Children’s Center for psychological study, where he ends up in Celia Griswold’s art therapy class. Two subthemes about cruelty to animals glance off the main storyline: Hunters kill deer illegally on the Griswolds’ country property, and a retarded shepherd begins grazing his flock near their home. Meanwhile, Celia gets Davy to turn out endless drawings for her—which are nearly always of Batman with his crotch heavily blackened. Celia considers this a likely indication of child abuse, and her chats with Chet only strengthen her suspicions. We follow Chet as he sneaks into Celia’s home while she’s away. At the same time, Celia’s husband Jack is having an affair with his secretary at the insurance agency he runs. When he and his lover go off for a weekend, Celia is left alone in the woods, and Chet’s fiendish schemes begin, with murder the lighter side of his joys. Chet’s grim illness is ghastly, but the plot twists and climax are unsurprising, reducing this to a standard-issue thriller.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18051-9
Page Count: 294
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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