Every gossipy soul has a job, a spouse, and a hidden past Blauner (Man of the Hour, 1999, etc.) knows all about. The result...
Ambitious attempt to focus all manner of contemporary suburban malaise on one woman’s murder.
The floater lacks a head, and Riverside (NY) Police Chief Harold Baltimore’s first impulse is to dismiss the victim as somebody from the lesser side of the tracks, but the liposuction scars mark it, chillingly, as a local. And the missing-persons report online sports-memorabilia salesman Jeffrey Lanier files on returning from a trip to raise venture capital instantly makes it clear that his wife Sandi’s rounds of soccer carpooling and shopping expeditions for 22 Love Lane have come to an end. Budding photographer Lynn Stockdale Schulman is devastated, not just by the loss of her best friend, but by the way Det. Lt. Michael Fallon, a lifelong Riversider who recently lost his bid for the Chief’s job, is taking the opportunity of questioning her to rekindle their high-school romance. Indifferent to her loving husband Barry, an attorney whose biotech firm is having its own problems, and to her own indifference, Michael chats up Lynn, gropes her, pulls Barry over, and arrests him. When Barry, oblivious to just how touchy a history Lynn has with Michael, urges her to file a harassment suit against him, the pot boils so furiously that it’s hard to remember poor Sandi’s murder. But Michael’s loose-cannon behavior isn’t the only thing blurring Blauner’s focus. A torrent of exhaustively observed detail—the reactions of Lynn’s reading-circle friends, the reluctance of the Salvadorean immigrant who withdrew her harassment charges against Michael, the town’s ache over the locals killed in the World Trade Center—give it a sociological richness. Underneath, though, the story is starkly simple: Who loosed the snake in the designer garden, and what are the locals going to do about it?
Every gossipy soul has a job, a spouse, and a hidden past Blauner (Man of the Hour, 1999, etc.) knows all about. The result is a whodunit that thinks it’s an epic.Pub Date: May 14, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-09873-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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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