Get your motor runnin’ and head out on the highway with this mellow thriller that offers an affable take on road movies.
A retired satellite engineer encounters karma, love, and mayhem in Gilberg’s (Alice Chang, 2016) latest novel, set in the year 2012.
Starvation Mountain is 50-something Jim Schmidt’s “motorcycle playground”; its avocado groves and stunning views give him a respite from heartbreak and the Silicon Beach rat race. He plans to build a home there and spend his days exploring Southern California on his motorcycle. When he meets a “lanky California blonde” in the area who goes by the name of Penny Lane, it’s love at first sight. He invites her along on the motorcycle ride of a lifetime, retracing the same route from Los Angeles to New Orleans that was made famous in the 1969 film Easy Rider. But Jim’s new traveling companion comes with baggage: Penny’s former boss, Mack, is in serious trouble with some sketchy, downright homicidal men. With the bad guys in hot pursuit, it seems like Jim and Penny could share the Easy Rider characters’ grim fates. But they avoid this thanks to Jim’s survival instinct—and what could possibly be the ghost of James Dean, acting as a guardian angel. Gilberg’s previous novel, in which Jim appeared as a character, traded in the high stakes of the international thriller, but this follow-up takes more of a Laurel Canyon approach, opting for a story that owes more to New Hollywood than it does to James Bond. The thrills largely take second billing to the romance, the landscape, and the motorcycle-riding life. Still, Gilberg is careful not to shortchange the reader during the action scenes, which explode with well-crafted mayhem. The author occasionally overuses italics for emphasis, but this is a minor stylistic flaw in an otherwise highly enjoyable work. Gilberg’s clear affinity for all things ’60s, exemplified by a stream of classic-rock references, makes this a must-read for hog-lovin’ baby boomers.
Get your motor runnin’ and head out on the highway with this mellow thriller that offers an affable take on road movies.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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