Cleverly offbeat, often cheeky, and loads of fun.
An agent’s newest assignment finds him facing off against a nefarious witch hellbent on world domination in Cash’s (The After House, 2014, etc.) thriller-comedy.
Wes Rockville hasn’t been living up to his law enforcement family’s stellar reputation. When he screws up a prisoner-transport job, cop dad Harris gives Wes one last chance by reassigning him to the Witches Protection Program. Before Wes can utter doubt of witches’ existence, he and new partner Alistair Verne have a case. Witch Junie “Baby Fat” Meadows suspects something sinister is happening at Pendragon Cosmetics. There’s a lot of secrecy surrounding the release of a new face cream, and according to Morgan, the niece of CEO Bernadette Pendragon, the cream’s formula includes a bit of witches’ DNA. Wes, Alistair, and Morgan try to stop Bernadette from using the beauty product to influence others’ thoughts. The spirited novel establishes its rules right away. The program, for example, protects only the Davinas, the good ones, while the Willas are the dark witches who thrive on mayhem. Cash revels in his deliberately old-school approach: witches cook spells in a pot; they ride brooms; and their spells rhyme, like Morgan’s hilarious chant of “No time to waste, give me speed, slide down forty floors on my ass, indeed.” Readers will breeze through this quick read, and the cast adds to the fun: Bernadette is a villain so powerful she can take down a helicopter with ease; Wes may be a skeptic, but he doesn’t waste time discounting the things he sees—especially when it’s a woman transforming into a panther and using his foot as a chew toy. Wes is a fascinating protagonist whose biggest hurdle, it seems, is dyslexia, or what his gruff father flippantly calls “that reading thing.” The short, action-laden novel speeds past any nuances from developing characters’ relationships, but Cash does leave room for a couple of surprises. The story’s case is more or less wrapped up by the end, with a lingering impression that this could be the first of many to come.
Cleverly offbeat, often cheeky, and loads of fun.Pub Date: May 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5114-1134-9
Page Count: 238
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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