Zigzagging plot rife with suspense and character detail.
A man becomes entangled in a conspiracy of murder and deceit with ties to a years-old murder charge for which he received an acquittal in Pineiro’s (co-author, with Joe Weber: Ashes of Victory, 2018, etc.) thriller.
David Wallace’s encounter with Kate Larson at a San Francisco bar ends with her cryptic note: “Things were not as they seemed 7 years ago.” Back then, in his hometown of Austin, cops arrested David for the murder of Heather Wilson, with whom he’d had an affair. Though evidence later exonerated him, he’s still wracked with guilt: his wife, Evelyn, presumably distraught over his arrest, died shortly thereafter in a car accident that killed her and their son. Soon after meeting Kate, David witnesses a thuggish man and an Asian woman accosting her. He intervenes but is knocked unconscious and wakes up near a body (not Kate’s) that, according to police, goes missing. Things only get stranger back in Texas, where David runs Hill Country Haven, a shelter for battered women. He’s fairly certain he spots Kate at the airport, and, sure enough, he gets a note telling him to go to Heather’s old place at a specified time. Before long, he and his HCH assistant, Margaret Black, catch the attention of Detective Beckett Mar, who had worked Heather’s case and still considers David guilty. New murders in Austin complicate matters along with an abduction, the FBI’s involvement, and a shocking number of secrets David uncovers revolving around the series of grim events that unfolded seven years earlier. Pineiro’s novel thrives on copious plot turns. But the author wisely doesn’t save every twist until the end; the identity of the thug in San Francisco is one that readers learn relatively early, and it’s a doozy. The narrative eventually reveals a massive conspiracy that involves David’s former place of employment and a long list of cast members. Pineiro maintains cohesion by fully developing characters and relationships. For example, FBI Agent Jessica Herrera eases into the story with her connection to David—she had introduced him to Evelyn and therefore has a reason, perhaps, to despise him. As a protagonist, David is an even mix of sympathy and character flaws. His guilty conscience, for one, is understandable. But he’s also a man with a somber past. His father had regularly abused David and his mother for years before beating his mother to death. Other characters likewise shine: Ryan Horowitz, David’s supportive friend and attorney; and Margaret, a strong woman who survived a gang rape. The prose, in the voice of narrator David, is simple but potent; a line from HCH’s ad campaign, “Be Not Afraid,” becomes a refrain for characters (not just David) to prevail over deterrents. The steady pace sags under a surfeit of exposition in the final act. But high-stakes perils unfold throughout, and surprises persist all the way to the epilogue.
Zigzagging plot rife with suspense and character detail.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 273
Publisher: Auspicious Apparatus Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2018
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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