Methodical, efficient, brand-name genre thrills guaranteed not to frighten the horses.
Laurie Moran and the crew of Under Suspicion (The Cinderella Murder, 2014, etc.) revisit the 5-year-old case of the bride who vanished hours before she was supposed to walk down the aisle.
Despite some understandable last-minute jitters on both sides, Amanda Pierce had been looking forward eagerly to joining hands in marriage with attorney Jeff Hunter at the splishy Grand Victoria Hotel in Palm Springs. Instead she went down in tabloid history as the runaway bride who disappeared the night before the ceremony. Now her mother, Sandra Pierce, wants Under Suspicion, which specializes in dramatizing, and incidentally solving, cold cases on television, to reopen the mystery. Producer Laurie gets Walter Pierce, Sandra’s workaholic ex, on board, along with bridesmaids Kate Fulton, Meghan White, and Charlotte Pierce, the bride’s older sister, and groomsmen Nick Young, Austin Pratt, and Henry Pierce, the bride’s brother. Complications have already arisen before the Under Suspicion crew even arrives in Florida. Jeff is now married to Meghan, whom he had dated briefly before she introduced him to Amanda back at Colby College, the school the wedding party had all attended. Bill Walker, the wedding photographer, suddenly recalls that the police never questioned his intern, Jeremy Carroll, who, then as now, seemed a little bit off. Laurie can’t quite satisfy herself why Amanda would have left her modest belongings to Sandra Pierce, Henry’s daughter, but her $2 million trust fund to the fiance she’d just gotten to sign a prenup. And news about the strangling of Colby student Carly Romano back in the wedding party’s college days hangs like a dark cloud over the increasingly tense Grand Victoria.
Methodical, efficient, brand-name genre thrills guaranteed not to frighten the horses.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0855-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
Wendig is clearly wrestling with some of the demons of our time, resulting in a story that is ambitious, bold, and worthy of...
What if the only way to save humanity was to lose almost everyone?
This was kind of inevitable: Wendig (Vultures, 2019, etc.) wrestles with a magnum opus that grapples with culture, science, faith, and our collective anxiety while delivering an epic equal to Steven King’s The Stand (1978). While it’s not advertised as an entry in Wendig’s horrifying Future Proof universe that includes Zer0es (2015) and Invasive (2016), it’s the spiritual next step in the author’s deconstruction of not only our culture, but the awful things that we—humanity—are capable of delivering with our current technology and terrible will. The setup is vividly cinematic: After a comet passes near Earth, a sleeping sickness takes hold, causing victims to start wandering in the same direction, barring those who spontaneously, um, explode. Simultaneously, a government-built, wickedly terrifying AI called Black Swan tells its minders that a disgraced scientist named Benji Ray might be the key to solving the mystery illness. Wendig breaks out a huge cast that includes Benji’s boss, Sadie Emeka; a rock star who’s a nod to King’s Springsteen-esque Larry Underwood; a pair of sisters—one of whom is part of the “herd” of sleepwalkers and one who identifies as a “shepherd” tending to the sick; and Matthew Bird, who leads the faithful at God’s Light Church and who struggles with a world in which technology itself can become either God or the devil incarnate. Anyone who’s touched on Wendig’s oeuvre, let alone his lively social media presence, knows he’s a full-voiced political creature who’s less concerned with left and right than the chasm between right and wrong, and that impulse is fully on display here. Parsing the plot isn’t really critical—Wendig has stretched his considerable talents beyond the hyperkinetic horror that is his wheelhouse to deliver a story about survival that’s not just about you and me, but all of us, together.
Wendig is clearly wrestling with some of the demons of our time, resulting in a story that is ambitious, bold, and worthy of attention.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-18210-5
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
The moral overcomes the mystery in this sobering cautionary tale.
A hard-partying flight attendant runs afoul of Russian conspirators.
Cassandra Bowden, like her namesake, the prophetess who is never believed, has problems. A flight attendant since college, Cassie, now nearing 40, has a penchant for drinking to the blackout point and sleeping with strange men. On a flight to Dubai, while serving in first class, she flirts with hedge fund manager Alex Sokoloff, an American with Russian roots and oligarchic connections. She repairs to his hotel room, and during the drunken bacchanal that follows, Miranda, apparently a business acquaintance of Alex’s, visits with more vodka. The next morning Cassie wakes up next to Alex, who lies dead, his throat cut. She has blacked out much of the night, so although she’d grown rather fond of him, how can she be sure she didn’t kill him? Rushing back for the return flight, she decides not to disclose what happened, at least not until she's back home in New York City, where the justice system is arguably less draconian than in Dubai. At JFK, the FBI interviews the deplaning crew, and Cassie plays dumb. Unfortunately, her walk of shame through the hotel lobby was captured on security cam. Sporadically intercut with Cassie’s point of view is that of Elena, a Russian assassin for hire, who had presented herself as Miranda in Alex’s hotel room. After being thwarted by Cassie’s presence from executing Alex then, she returned to finish the job but decided not to make collateral damage of his passed-out bedmate, a bad call she must rectify per her sinister handler, Viktor. In the novel’s flabby midsection, Cassie continues to alternately binge-drink and regret the consequences as her lawyer, her union, and even the FBI struggle to protect her from herself. Although Bohjalian (The Sleepwalker, 2017, etc.) strives to render Cassie sympathetic, at times he can’t resist taking a judgmental stance toward her. As Cassie’s addiction becomes the primary focus, the intricate plotting required of an international thriller lags.
The moral overcomes the mystery in this sobering cautionary tale.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-385-54241-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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