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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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