The "duhs" outnumber the thrills in the 81-year-old Cook's latest.
After his wife, Emma, contracts deadly eastern equine encephalitis and he gets taken for an obscene ride by a predatory health insurance company, ex-cop Brian Murphy fights back.
When he and Emma retired from the NYPD's elite Emergency Service Unit to start a high-end personal protection security firm, they signed up for a short-term health insurance policy they didn't bother to read. After Emma falls ill following a mosquito bite and their 4-year-old daughter, Juliette, sinks into mysterious symptoms of her own, Murphy is left in an increasingly desperate state as uncovered bills soar near $200,000 and hospital officials and doctors give him the cold shoulder. He finds an ally and superior babysitter in Jeanne, a French-born woman with a background in child psychology he meets in the waiting room of a medical billing advocate. She was victimized by the same health insurance company after her husband suffered a heart attack, received inadequate treatment, and died. Oh, to have been in France, where their health care system is "so, so much better." Those expecting another outbreak thriller from the prolific author of Pandemic (2018) and Contagion (1995) will be disappointed to encounter what is largely a diatribe against the American health care system. It certainly deserves to be taken on, but Cook's priggish lectures about this hotbed of "personal greed trumping altruism" stop the novel in its tracks. The same confrontations are staged over and over, with the protagonist seemingly unable to read the writing on the wall or recognize obvious things until long after the reader has. And what the reader will see as unhinged behavior on Murphy's part, Cook somehow sees as reasonable. The book can be oddly compelling but goes off the rails in any number of ways.
The "duhs" outnumber the thrills in the 81-year-old Cook's latest.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-32829-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.
Hill, son of the master, turns in a near-perfect homage to Stephen King.
Arthur Oakes has problems. One is that his mom, a social justice warrior, has landed in the slammer for unintentional manslaughter. And he’s one of just three Black kids at an expensive college (in Maine, of course), an easy target. A local townie drug dealer extorts him into stealing rare books from the school’s library, including one bound in human skin. The unwilling donor of said skin turns up, and so do various sinister people, one reminiscent of Tolkien’s Gollum, another a hick who lives—well, sort of—to kill. Then there’s Colin Wren, whose grandfather collects things occult. As will happen, an excursion into that arcana conjures up the title character, a very evil dragon, who strikes an agreement with fine print requiring Arthur and his circle to provide him with a sacrifice every Easter. “It’s a bad idea to make a deal with them,” says Arthur, belatedly. “Language is one of their weapons…as much as the fire they breathe or the tail that can knock down a house.” King Sorrow roasts his first victims, and the years roll by, with Arthur becoming a medieval scholar (fittingly enough, with a critical scene set at King Arthur’s fortress at Tintagel), Colin a tech billionaire with Muskian undertones (“King Sorrow was a dragon, but Colin was some sort of dark sorcerer”), and others of their circle suffering from either messing with dragons or living in an America of despair. There’s never a dull moment, and though Hill’s yarn is very long, it’s full of twists and turns and, beg pardon, Easter eggs pointing to Kingly takes on politics, literature, and internet trolls (a meta MAGA remark comes from an online review of Arthur’s book on dragons: “i was up for a good book about finding magical sords and stabbing dragons and rescuing hot babes in chainmail panties but instead i got a lot of WOKE nonsense.…and UGH it just goes on and on, couldve been hundreds of pages shorter”).
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780062200600
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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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