McCluskey (Intrusion, 2016), who is equally at home in Los Angeles and rural England, works a few changes on the romantic mystery in her suspenseful second novel.
Advertising executive Alison, mildly dissatisfied with her marriage and job in southern California, finds an excuse to return to her British hometown when one of her childhood best friends, the rebellious Sophie, is found dead in a hotel room, presumably the victim of an accidental drug overdose. Back home, Alison meets up with another old friend, sophisticated Liz, and, more significantly, with Sophie's older brother, Matt, now married to a chilly Frenchwoman. Alison, who had a crush on Matt throughout her adolescence, finds one excuse after another to linger in England, ignoring her husband's phone calls, and Matt appears glad to spend time with her. Drawn to investigate the suspicious circumstances of Sophie's death, Alison talks to old friends and neighbors and interviews the residents and management at a shelter for abused women where Sophie briefly stayed while she was hiding out from drug dealers to whom she owed money. While readers are likely to guess before Alison does that Matt has some secret motives behind his new adoration of his sister's friend, various other members of the Savages, the old neighborhood gang of which Sophie and Matt were the ringleaders, complicate the mystery intriguingly. A strong sense of place and McCluskey's keen grasp of the ambivalence confronting an expatriate who is tempted to return to the dubious comforts of home keep the novel from seeming simply frothy. Though mystery fans may be put off by the unlikely courtroom drama that brings the novel to a climax, and the even more unlikely moments of enlightenment Alison experiences during this drama, she's a likable character, and it's easy to understand her self-delusion.
For readers who enjoy reminiscences of childhood in the British countryside and don't object to love-addled heroines.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4632-9
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE
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BOOK REVIEW
A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986
ISBN: 0553381547
Page Count: 686
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
84
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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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