by Martin J. Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 27, 2016
Smith’s bite-sized chapters keep the pot boiling—even if many of the ingredients here are familiar, they’re expertly...
Journalist/thriller writer Smith (The Wild Duck Chase, 2012, etc.) uses the death of a successful developer to dig deep into the victim’s family and the California landscape.
Some people call Paul Dwyer the man who built the San Fernando Valley’s Inland Empire; some call him a hard-nosed bargainer who resented every penny he paid his contractors. His wife, Shelby, and their 17-year-old daughter, Chloe, could add much more if they chose. Shelby, for instance, knows that her husband was murdered by LoveSick, the online correspondent to whom she poured out her heart and received in exchange his promise to grant her dearest wish, an outcome that shocks and horrifies her. When Dwyer’s found dumped in an evaporating pond in Villa Condero, one of his own developments, the detective who catches the case is Ron Starke, a significant fraction of the Los Colmas Police Department. He’s an even better choice than his coldhearted boss, Chief Donna Kerrigan, can know, because Shelby Dwyer was his first love 20 years ago, long before she was married and widowed. Treading on eggshells when he’s obliged to question Shelby, he’s drawn instead to search for the perfectly good computer she traded in the day she reported her husband missing, even though he has an uneasy feeling it will disclose information he doesn’t want to learn. At length Starke’s inquiries, which lead him further and further out on a limb, get him placed on administrative leave just in time for LoveSick to swoop down in the middle of a forest fire right out of Ross Macdonald’s classic Southern California fable The Underground Man.
Smith’s bite-sized chapters keep the pot boiling—even if many of the ingredients here are familiar, they’re expertly mixed—and the denouement will likely pack a punch even for readers who’ve seen it coming.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-626-81919-1
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Diversion Books
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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