bookshelf

Twin River III

Name: Twin River III
Author: Michael Fields

A DEATH AT ONE THOUSAND STEPS

by Michael Fields ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

Tends to meander but delivers flashes of violence that will satisfy action fans.

bookshelf

In Fields’ (Twin River II, 2014) latest thriller, security agent Wesley Palladin settles down and criminal forces prepare to further exploit innocent lives.

It’s 1980 in rural Pennsylvania where the Juniata and the Little Juniata rivers flow. On the Calvin property, in Polecat Hollow, pornographers Luther Cicconi and Max Wright keep high school teens Heather Wainwright and Alice Byrd prisoner in Winnebagos for later filming. Though wild pigs protect the property, the group hopes for backup muscle from Philadelphia mobster Don Scavone. Elsewhere in Polecat Hollow, high school sophomore Matt Henry has hired the security firm Have Weapons Will Travel for his father’s bank (see Twin River II), but Wesley Palladin confronts evil wherever he finds it and is more than willing to step in. Cicconi knows that the formidable Palladin—and his battle-ready friend, Vietnam veteran Gene Brooks—threatens his interests. Meanwhile, with Matt’s father supposedly on vacation, Palladin has moved into the Henrys’ guesthouse with Jane Romano, who’s hiding from her mobster husband, Caesar. To help Jane’s son Cody fit in, Matt tells him about the One Thousand Steps mountain trail that leads to the Virgin Heart lovers’ hideaway. There, couples can bless their future together. Yet for others, like the pregnant Becky, who’s stalked by the insane Abel Towers, the One Thousand Steps can mean doom. In the third outing to Twin River, Fields re-emphasizes the area’s signature eeriness with lines like, “Branches dropped low and pierced naked fingers through the mist.” Series motifs recur, including references to Catcher in the Rye and the traumas seen during the Vietnam War. Amid wandering plotlines, the author often inserts scenes of scantily clad girls rescued by vigilante gunfire, and fans of raw 1970s narratives (Deliverance and Straw Dogs) will find much to cheer. Occasionally, the prose offers humor (one gangster says, “I’ll kill you until it hurts”) and life lessons; Palladin tells Cody, “If everything’s given to you, you’ll be a spoiled teenager the rest of your life.” The finale brings brief closure while setting up the next installment.

Tends to meander but delivers flashes of violence that will satisfy action fans.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher

Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

- BOOK REVIEW
ONE GREY NIGHT IT HAPPENED
by Michael Fields

- BOOK REVIEW
TWIN RIVER II
by Michael Fields

bookshelf

THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

bookshelf

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

- AWARDS
Mantel, Woodson on Women’s Prize Longlist

- SEEN & HEARD
Reese’s Book Club Reveals April Pick

bookshelf

THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

bookshelf

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.