A brisk and engaging read that manages to demonstrate that there are some problems no amount of money can forestall, or...
A runaway bride leaves behind a thicket of family secrets and betrayals in Vincenzi’s (The Decision, 2011, etc.) latest export.
Set in 1990s England (and originally published in 1994), this novel features several situations that could only exist in an era without ubiquitous cell phones. When Cressida, delicate daughter of society gynecologist James Forrest, disappears the morning of her wedding day, she’s well and truly incommunicado. Unfolding over two days, the Cressida debacle wreaks no end of recriminations (and accompanying flashbacks) among James’ overprivileged and ingrown circle of family and friends. James himself is at the epicenter—his only brush with malpractice resulted in the birth of Ottoline (now 20, a supermodel, and for reasons that defy cursory explanation, a wedding guest) and the stillbirth of her twin sister. Cressida’s older sister Harriet has always resented her—for being their parents’ favorite and for causing Harriet's banishment to a bleak boarding school. Now Harriet’s fashion business teeters on the brink of bankruptcy. James’ oldest friend Theo, a billionaire, unwittingly abetted Cressida’s escape by paying for her flying lessons, and was, until his marriage to fifth wife Sasha, carrying on an affair with Harriet. Their mutual attraction lingers. Elderly but still vital godparents, world traveler Sir Merlin and French sophisticate Janine, attempt unsuccessfully to lighten the prevailing gloom. The younger generation, including Theo’s dissolute son Mungo, Rufus, son of James and his long-term mistress Susie, and Oliver, the American groom left at the altar, are as mired in melodrama as their elders. Facts emerge revealing Cressida to be less English rose than shrewd operator. As the search for Cressida intensifies, we learn interesting information about the other characters.
A brisk and engaging read that manages to demonstrate that there are some problems no amount of money can forestall, or rectify.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59020-357-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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