Quick pacing and a satisfyingly complicated plot make this mystery a lively read.
Intrigues large and small abound in this debut historical novel set in a late 19th-century Florida boardinghouse.
Widowed Emma Wakefield, the proprietress of a boardinghouse, receives some deeply upsetting news. Her cousin Andrew Langley, a Secret Service agent investigating a counterfeiting ring in Atlanta, has been found dead; he was headed to their home in St. Augustine. Emma is devastated, as is Andrew’s fiancee, Clarissa. But when a textile salesman named Samuel Thompson arrives at Wakefield House claiming to be an old friend of Andrew’s, Emma’s suspicions are aroused. He doesn’t have any cloth samples with him; he sweeps Clarissa off her feet by taking her sailing; and Emma finds a bag of Andrew’s belongings in Samuel’s room that he glibly passes off as his own. And stranger still, after Samuel tells the women a tragic story about his dead wife, Rebecca, a Rebecca Thompson shows up in St. Augustine, imperiously demanding to see her husband. But as a businesswoman, Emma has her own troubles—a boarder’s jewelry and scarves vanish; her accounting of Wakefield House’s finances doesn’t quite add up; and her serving maid Henny develops a strange infatuation with Samuel. Through this tangled web of duplicity, Emma must navigate the poorer, seedier side of St. Augustine, facing unexplained deaths, gambling, and drunkenness to figure out why Andrew died and what’s going on in Wakefield House. Suzanne leads readers through her complex, diverting plot at a quick clip, telling her tale through the eyes of multiple characters, often when they’re doing something illicit. The technique adds drama, to be sure, but it also detracts from the fun of a whodunit because the reader knows exactly who did it. While Emma is a fully imagined protagonist—she’s poised and confident, treating her serving staff as equals—the other characters are noticeably flatter. The ones doing the titular deceiving are drunks, poisoners, and thieves without a single redeeming quality; the destitute children are too waifish and innocent. And one wishes the author would lavish more details on the fascinating, underappreciated time and place she sets her entertaining story, beyond the clumps of palmetto trees and gopher turtle stew that add subtle color.
Quick pacing and a satisfyingly complicated plot make this mystery a lively read.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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