An involving and fast-moving family-ghost thriller.
A young woman must survive the twists and terrors of a family curse in Wheaton’s horror novel.
As the story opens, readers meet young Cecily LeClercq as she’s living her life just the way she prefers: mostly alone, and surrounded by the natural world. She explores the South Carolina shoreline along the Edisto and Wadmalaw Rivers, occasionally finding interesting specimens to share with her friend and boss, Ina Anolik, the owner of an exclusive Charleston landscaping firm. Cecily’s peaceful life has been won at a hard cost; when she was a child, she saw her mother driven into the hurricane-churned surf by a terrifying wraith. But Cecily’s current peace is upended by the arrival of a messenger from France, where her old and ill great-grandmother has summoned her to the estate of the ancient, powerful LeClercq family. Cecily decides to go, despite her awareness of a malediction bedeviling the family—a curse that seems to find each new generation; a casual internet search reveals that years ago, her grandfather apparently went insane, murdered her grandmother, and then took his own life. Although her great-grandmother dies while she’s en route to Paris, she feels an immediate kinship when she sees the house she’s inherited: It’s absolutely full of plant life, like a miniature forest. But there are dangers lurking, not only in the ranks of the LeClercq family, but also perhaps in the supernatural realm, and Cecily may be marked for death.
Wheaton makes a shrewd decision to present Cecily as likable from the start, and she serves as an effective Everywoman for the reader as the plot takes bizarre turns. These include the revelation that the LeClercq curse has a ruthless proviso: It isn’t just the heirs, but also the people around them who may fall victim to the titular wraith, and these troubles may only be avoided if the heir commits suicide. The family’s sardonic old retainer doesn’t believe in the curse, but Cecily’s great-aunt, the Countess Aline, urgently warns her that it’s very real, indeed. Wheaton does an efficient, controlled job of drawing the reader into that reality—first with genuinely creepy vision flashes and then with real-world horror manifestations that are significantly enhanced by the author’s evocations of various, creepy French locales. The pace continuously escalates, and each of Cecily’s discoveries about her family’s past makes her more determined to understand the curse and to figure out how to survive it. As she tracks the murderous wraith closer and closer to its lair, Wheaton loads his narrative with shocking moments and the equivalent of Hollywood-film jump scares. The cast of characters that Cecily meets in the vicinity of her family home are quickly and colorfully fleshed out, and even in the darkest and diciest moments, Wheaton remembers to give these supporting players some choice lines. Longtime readers of horror and gothic fiction will find little that’s new in these pages, but the pace and energy that the author brings to the task more than compensates for its familiarity.
An involving and fast-moving family-ghost thriller.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.
What hasn’t legendary legal eagle Grisham tried yet? How about a thriller about serial kidnapping and international terrorism.
When Paul and Chelsea Tanner disappear during a day trip on their Paris honeymoon, their abductors demand a ransom of $2 million from Chelsea’s wealthy parents, and a few days later the same sum from Paul’s much less well-heeled parents. After orthopedist Lowell Clayburn, Chelsea’s father, ponies up the ransom without breathing a word to the authorities, his daughter is promptly released. But even though Paul’s parents sell their home, liquidate their assets, and borrow money from the Clayburns to meet the kidnappers’ demands, the villains hold on to Paul anyway. Asked whether he’s ever seen such an outcome in a double kidnapping, FBI deputy director Andrew Strong tells Lowell: “No, this is a new one.” But it’s not, as Strong knows all too well; it’s the third such active case, all involving honeymooning couples whose bridegrooms had served in the armed forces. After masterfully drawing readers in with his bare-knuckle account of the Tanners’ abduction and the attempt by their families and the CIA to tell the lies required to keep caring friends and the rapacious press at bay, Grisham effortlessly switches gears to follow CIA agent Rae Claire Russo and Stuart Nash, a former Department of Justice prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay who agrees to marry her so they can serve as bait for the kidnappers, whose motives include justice and revenge as well as cold hard cash. So much for the imprisoned Paul’s wistful reflection that “hopefully, it was only about money.”
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780385550543
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
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
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