Smashing glass, thudding copter blades, rumbling boulders: Labyrinth has popcorn written all over it.
A clutch of action-movie set pieces in which cavers, scientists, escaped convicts, and the US Cavalry race after a moon rock hidden in a cavern.
Already sold to Paramount (with Scott Rudin producing), Labyrinth begins with what will surely become its pretitle sequence: lunar astronauts discover a rock with awesome powers of superconductivity. Thirty-two years later, moon rock 66095 turns up at a Tennessee lab where scientists search for new sources of energy. Eager to reap the rewards the rock may bring, assistant Robert Gregor garrotes his supervisor when the latter insists on credit for discovering the rock’s powers. Author Sullivan (Ghost Dance, 1999) then shifts scenes to the dysfunctional Burke family. Mother Whitney awakes again from a recurring nightmare about the drowning of a friend in a cave they’d been exploring. Traumatized, Whitney has withdrawn from husband Tom and daughter Cricket, and she refuses to join them on the Artemis Project, a NASA program that will train moon explorers in Tennessee’s vast Labyrinth Cave. Fast cross-cuts follow. Led by Gregor (who raves like a mad scientist from Superman), a group of escaped convicts force Tom and Cricket to lead them into the cave, where, it seems, rock 66095 has been hidden. Local police entreat Whitney to take them into Labyrinth to nab the escapees as mounting floods stir her fears. Lightning rends the rock, displacing so much power it sets off an earthquake that, in turn, causes a nearby dam to burst. Cricket has to rappel down a cable to rescue Gregor, who dangles beside a roaring waterfall. The US president sends in the cavalry to retrieve the rock before it triggers another Hiroshima. Finally, everyone faces off, center cave, as a prison officer pulls a twist that’s sure to bring raspberries from the peanut gallery.
Smashing glass, thudding copter blades, rumbling boulders: Labyrinth has popcorn written all over it.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7434-3980-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
A Gone Girl–esque confection with villainy and melodrama galore.
A wealthy woman with a handsome husband is preyed on by a ruthless con artist.
One day at the gym, Amber Patterson drops the magazine she’s reading between her exercise bike and that of the woman who happens to be beside her, Daphne Parrish. As she bends to pick it up, Daphne notices that it’s the publication of a cystic fibrosis foundation. What a coincidence—Daphne’s sister died of cystic fibrosis, and, why, so did Amber’s! “Slowing her pace, Amber wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. It took a lot of acting skills to cry about a sister who never existed.” Step one complete. “All she needed from Daphne was everything.” Everything, in this case, consists of Daphne’s outlandishly wealthy and blisteringly hot husband, Jackson, and all the real estate that comes with him; Daphne can definitely keep her two whiny brats. Amber hates children. But once she finds out that Daphne’s failure to give Jackson a male heir is the main source of tension in the marriage, she sees exactly how to make this work. Amber’s constant, spiteful inner monologue as she plays up to Daphne is the best thing about this book. For example, as Daphne talks about the many miseries her sister Julie went through before her death, Amber is thinking, “At least Julie had grown up in a nice house with money and parents who cared about her. Okay, she was sick and then she died. So what? A lot of people were sick. A lot of people died.…How about Amber and what she’d gone through?” Meanwhile, poor, stupid Daphne is so caught up in the joy of finally having a friend, she seems to be handing Jackson to her on a platter. Constantine’s debut novel is the work of two sisters in collaboration, and these ladies definitely know the formula.
A Gone Girl–esque confection with villainy and melodrama galore.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-266757-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on...
After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that’s as dark as any of Patrick’s cases.
Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean’s parents’ house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy’s friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it’s Jimmy’s turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he’s got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who’s done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend’s official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave’s wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else’s blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it’s easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all.
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters’ heads.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-16316-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
