An admirable tie-in that gives its protagonist all the qualities that made her indelible on TV more than a decade ago.
Whip-smart teen detective Veronica Mars does some off-the-books gumshoeing for a friend in Green’s debut mystery, inspired by the cult mid-2000s TV series.
Veronica may be the least popular student at California’s Neptune High. This is largely due to her unwavering support of her dad, Keith, who accused local billionaire Jake Kane of “holding back” in the murder investigation of Jake’s daughter (and Veronica’s best friend), Lilly. This resulted in Keith’s forced exit from the sheriff’s office and his daughter’s new status as a pariah among her peers. Veronica now works part-time for her PI father and has only one friend, Wallace Fennel. She comes to Wallace’s aid after two masked assailants rob the Sac-n-Pack convenience store where he works. The stolen items include his wallet, which contained basketball-game tickets, which he received courtesy of LeBron James, a teammate at Wallace’s former school. Despite the robbers’ warning to Wallace not to mess with PCH, a local biker gang, Veronica suspects that the culprits may be fellow high schoolers. Soon, she’s interrogating schoolmates to find out who among them doesn’t have a sturdy alibi. There’s potential danger when she later confronts the actual PCH, and also a ticking clock, as the basketball game is a mere week away, and LeBron had promised to introduce Wallace to Cleveland Cavaliers coaches. Green’s novella caters both to fans of the TV show and newcomers. The plot is set early in the series’ first season, and it features numerous secondary characters from the show. The author adequately re-creates Veronica’s endearing snarkiness and affinity for pop-culture references, which many readers will appreciate. Moreover, Green skillfully incorporates the show’s ongoing subplots, most notably Veronica’s harassment at school and her drugging and rape from the previous year, which is still part of an as-yet-unsolved mystery. It’s a solid link to the episodes that also provides added complications for the heroine. Her quest to unmask the robbers is a fairly run-of-the-mill mystery, but the appealing Veronica will make readers come back for future installments.
An admirable tie-in that gives its protagonist all the qualities that made her indelible on TV more than a decade ago.Pub Date: April 1, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 86
Publisher: Kindle Worlds
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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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