A masterly indictment of America’s failed racial politics that remembers to entertain.
In this debut thriller, a series of murders leads a rogue general to take the U.S.’s racial strife into his own hands.
A bus from Blue Ash, Ohio, carries 12 black girls toward the Freedom Church camp in Alabama. It’s a steamy July evening, and as night falls, the vehicle gets lost. Before Tommy, the driver, can fix the situation, two armed white men assault the bus. One of them breaks the front windshield, boards the vehicle, and drags Elizabeth Courtier away screaming. The next day, the bus is found “crashed” by the roadside, with 11 girls, as well as Tommy and the chaperone, Miss Marcy, dead. Enter coroner Shawn Briggs of Harbor Springs, Alabama, who finds that the two black adults died from gunshot wounds and the girls from brutal cuts inconsistent with the crash. Yet Colby County Sheriff John Parrish insists that the deaths remain “accidental” to keep racial tensions from boiling over. This doesn’t sit well with Briggs or his precocious daughter, 15-year-old Olivia. As the coverup proceeds—and fails—various parties observe the situation. One is President Errol Clarkson and another is the self-styled Gen. Anthony Sedgewick, a charismatic—though egomaniacal—military leader who plans to shock America into remembering the nightmare of slavery. In this unsettling tale, Allen displays the plotting chops of someone with five thrillers under her belt. Tension jolts upward with each heinous act perpetrated by Parrish and, later, Sedgewick, who revels in torturing his crop of white slaves in a besieged Colby County. The heroic coroner and his daughter are joined by Willie Scarlett, an elderly black farmer who’s spent a lifetime absorbing the slurs and bullying of his miserable, insecure white neighbors. Allen’s confident narrative rides higher by including the careerist CBN reporter Samantha King and Mexican killer Manuel Ortiz, whom Sedgewick tests to see “just how black” he is. Though the sadism of Allen’s villains delivers pulpy thrills, the message that all must fight racism “as children, not of color, not of God, but of right” rings loud and true.
A masterly indictment of America’s failed racial politics that remembers to entertain.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Burn House Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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