A tour de force whose detective chapters pale beside its escape-from-certain-death chapters.
Game warden Mike Bowditch’s 12th adventure sends him hurtling through the Maine woods into the past, just like his first 11.
Imperious Rhodesian-born widow Mariëtte Chamberlain is convinced that the death four years ago of her father-in-law, professor Eben Chamberlain, was murder, not the accident Sgt. Marc Rivard’s investigation pronounced it after Chamberlain’s decomposing corpse was pulled from the Androscoggin River. Now that Rivard has lost his job as a warden, she requests—no, demands—that Bowditch launch his own inquiry. This can’t possibly end well, not only because Bowditch must deal with both the client from hell and a resentful ex-boss he was never close to, but because the opening scene has already made Bowditch the victim of a snowy act of sabotage that sends his Jeep plummeting into the river with him and Shadow, his companion wolf, inside. Shuttling back and forth between this calamity and the steps that led up to it, Doiron shows Bowditch dutifully questioning Arlo Burch, the last person to see Chamberlain alive, and Bruce Jewett, the hunting companion Mariëtte Chamberlain is convinced was the professor’s secret lover and killer, while alternating chapters follow him as he escapes the sinking Jeep, makes his way from the freezing river, and struggles to warm himself before he succumbs to either hypothermia or whomever ran him off the road. Just in case the past doesn’t look menacing enough, Doiron, like a dog who can’t let go of a favored bone, brings back the criminal Dow family as yet another threat.
A tour de force whose detective chapters pale beside its escape-from-certain-death chapters.Pub Date: June 29, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2502-3510-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
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
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.
A middle-aged woman channels her best Miss Marple when she finds herself facing a nightmare from her past as she seeks to make sense of her present.
Jane Trevally is at a crossroads of sorts. After a traumatic childhood, she sought safety and solace in marriages with wealthy men. Now twice divorced and living with her four dogs in the crumbling English country mansion that is her birthright, she’s feeling the need to do something, to take a job, when one day a runaway dog turns up on her doorstep. The dog is chipped, and with the help of a local vet and her loyal stepson, Dexter Lombardi, Jane traces the dog’s home to the edge of Hampstead Heath, in London—a place that brings back the memory of a terrifying night from her youth, when a handsome man picked her up and took her back to this very house. Everything there felt wrong; she just managed to escape, certain that if she had stayed, she would have died that night. Now, soon after knocking on the door and returning the dog, she discovers that he had run away from an Airbnb near her house, where he had been staying with a young woman who seems to have disappeared. With the help of Dexter; his father, Tony, her second ex-husband; Tony’s former security enforcer, Tobias Wilson; and her own gift for connecting with people, Jane sets out to find the woman, taking her first steps on the path to becoming a private investigator. While Jane serves as the heart of the novel, Jewell also narrates chapters from several other characters’ points of view, all of which chip away at the horror that is the house on the Heath. By slowly revealing past and present simultaneously, Jewell keeps the mystery fresh as she plays with Gothic tropes and the timeless imagery of “a house of horrors” embodying human sin. She doesn’t flinch from exploring the depths of depravity in this house—and its humans.
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9781668033906
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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