A heartfelt conclusion to an intriguing climate-change trilogy.
The final volume in a trilogy of adventure stories set in a near-future Antarctica.
The first of Westhoff's Erebus Tales, Stone Fever (2020), introduced Keltyn SparrowHawk, a Canadian geologist in the climate change–ravaged 24th century whose mission to a snow-free Antarctica in search of precious iridium takes an unexpected turn when her plane crashes and she’s taken in by the migratory Onwei people. The story continued in The Color of Greed (2021) in which scheming industrialist Sir Oscar Bailey mounts another mission to exploit the Onwei for the iridium in their lands. As this third volume opens, SparrowHawk is in jail, and Bailey is set to send another mission to Antarctica’s forbidding Mount Erebus; his goal is to use the iridium buried there to build transport ships for Canadian colonists, much to the dismay of SparrowHawk, who, once free, again seeks to thwart the oligarch’s plans. She’s joined in this quest by her Onwei friends Luz Hogarth and Joaquin Beltran, and, although she doesn’t immediately know it, by anthropologist Fay Del Campo, who’s long been opposed to Bailey’s plans. These and other characters converge in a cross-cultural annual event called the Rendezvous, where their final fates will be determined, for good or ill. Early on in this installment, Westhoff makes skillful use of an initial scene in which SparrowHawk is interviewed about her story (“Please fill us in on the past year and a half of your life”), which will effectively bring new readers up to speed on the events of past novels. Although this final entry feels overlong, its brisk pace seldom slackens. The author’s talent for shaping his characters was evident in the first two volumes, and it remains strong here; the stories of Luz and Fay are particularly involving. Throughout the novel, the tension builds on its way to a gripping climax.
A heartfelt conclusion to an intriguing climate-change trilogy.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-77180-553-7
Page Count: 494
Publisher: Iguana Books
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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