A riveting thriller and a welcome third installment of a series; the author is definitely a writer to watch.
This novel poses two tantalizing questions: What happened to a young investigator, and why are people in Half Moon, Vermont, having mysterious health problems?
Jude Brannock, a senior investigator at the animal rights group The Kinship, has given Tim Mains an undercover assignment: Infiltrate the facility at Amaethon Industries and, if the company is flouting the Animal Welfare Act, document it. Tim is not only a rookie, but also Jude’s sometime lover. When reports from him suddenly stop, a worried Jude is off to Half Moon. Right off the bat, she is told that Tim has seduced young Heather Buck and introduced her to heroin (Jude is incredulous, rightly so). But drugs are definitely a big thing in little Half Moon, and soon Jude is nosing around that dangerous scene. Meanwhile, residents are showing up with heavy bruising, nosebleeds that won’t stop, and similar afflictions indicative of blood thinners. Oh, and Jude is having attacks of vision loss. Animals are suffering at Amaethon, but that may not be the worst of it. There may be a biotech disaster connected to the company’s experiments with “plant made pharmaceuticals.” The trials may have somehow gotten out of control. Could the PMPs be causing the rampant hemorrhaging? Jude eventually figures out who is to blame for the medical crisis and tries to bring the bad guys to justice in the hair-raising final chapters. What most impresses in Lamont’s (The Trap, 2015, etc.) third volume of her Kinship series is that things and people are not what they seem. Could Tim be a double agent? And then there’s Heather: The Bucks think that their daughter is innocence personified. A drug dealer named Bobby Gravaux is no saint, but is he a killer? Jude even suspects kindly Dr. John Harbolt of wrongdoing. So the author does a remarkable job of keeping readers off balance. Lamont also clearly explains PMPs, a plot point that involves real-world science, not fiction, and teases readers with the side issue of Jude’s periodic blindness. In addition, the author can deftly summon up a clipped style that reveals character as much as subject. Here Lamont describes a black mutt: “Very thin. Very fearful. And in this state, very dangerous.”
A riveting thriller and a welcome third installment of a series; the author is definitely a writer to watch.Pub Date: May 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9858485-8-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grayling Press
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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