Twisted and entertaining, this broad story of revenge is multi-faceted but close to the surface—a bug’s eye view into the...
A spirit takes the form of a white spider to alter the destinies of several Japanese villagers in this supernatural thriller set in the wake of World War II.
Following the war’s end, the American soldiers return home, leaving a trail of broken hearts and fatherless children—a setting created with simple prose packed with historical details. A mysterious white spider watches with disgust as American Tom takes advantage of the young Aiko before he leaves the country. Banks describes Tom and Aiko’s affair—and others throughout the story—with the explicitness of a romance novel but the tenderness of an assault. A tryst between another American soldier and an embittered Japanese woman, Tomoko, results in an unwanted daughter named Sarah. To pass the time before she and Sarah can relocate to a military base, Tomoko moves back to her parents’ village where Sarah meets a large cast of characters and becomes assimilated to Japanese culture through a slew of Japanese words and phrases: “Sarah was to learn that the floor was called ‘tatami’ in Japanese, and every home in Japan had them.” Sarah’s cousins persecute her for her mixed race and her mother insists the girl is possessed by the devil—and may not be entirely wrong. Sarah can read minds, communicate with the dead and punish her enemies with increasingly powerful psychic abilities, which she hones with the help of several spirits who sometimes give her conflicting advice. When the white spider enlists Sarah’s help in finding Aiko, who is now pregnant and missing from her village, Sarah learns to use her gifts for purposes greater than revenge. The numerous backstories and subplots are difficult to follow at first, but they all feed into the central conflict: Aiko’s fate, and that of her family and village, rest on the ability of Sarah and the white spider to uncover the truth.
Twisted and entertaining, this broad story of revenge is multi-faceted but close to the surface—a bug’s eye view into the darkness of the human soul.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450035422
Page Count: 369
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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