A lengthy, flawed sequel about a complicated spiritual quest that requires deep familiarity with the first installment.
The second book in a series about the heavy legacy of an old golden cross.
This sequel to Redemption: Angel Ascending(2021) resumes the story of Ronan James Cassidy, who shares the author’s name, and a haunted figure named David Michael Sonneman. The story starts with the 1977 road-trip adventures of two other young men named Jimmy and Matthew, who are driving north from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; they arrive, bedraggled, at a bar in the Fell’s Point neighborhood of Baltimore, where they quickly get involved in a brawl. As the narrative broadens out, the later story of David and Ronan, and the ancient golden cross that links their destinies, comes to the fore and is deepened. In the previous volume, David began to learn the centuries-old secrets of his bloodline, and over the course of this present volume, he, his sister, Nadiel, and Ronan encounter more revelations. The narrative expands to include many secondary characters, including, most notably, the wealthy, “miserable curmudgeon” Clay Calhoun, of whom David was a protégé and whose machinations play a pivotal role in some of this sequel’s action. And as in the previous novel, characters raise some deep philosophical and religious questions along the way, as when one character asks Daniel, “Why do the guilty so irksomely cling to the false presumption of human mercy at the very moment their guilt is to be so prosecuted in accordance with terms so judiciously and so clearly ordained by mutual and willing accord?”
The main weakness of the second volume in Cassidy’s series is that it’s very much a second volume and will only appeal to readers who’ve read the first. This is signaled by the fact that it starts with Book III and Chapter 21, titled “Denouement” (an off-putting way for a book of more than 600 pages to begin), and also by the first sentence, which reads, in part: “it was…readily apparent to the reader of said notations and musings that some of the most pertinent details surrounding the event of their hurried getaway had been omitted per the author’s discretion.” These exemplify how Cassidy makes no attempt to orient new readers to the series, as this long novel is not merely a direct sequel, but, in many ways, an appendix to its predecessor. As in the first book, the prose is often quite wooden; there are numerous malapropisms (“pretty well worse for ware”) and awkward phrases (“the two had reached the end of the line for this rodeo”) along with unnatural dialogue. The book will likely appeal to readers who enjoyed the first volume in the series, and the author loads the story with issues of cosmic and spiritual significance that fans of the works of Dan Brown or Carlos Castaneda may appreciate. However, without believable characters to anchor the proceedings, that broader story feels rather rote and academic in the end.
A lengthy, flawed sequel about a complicated spiritual quest that requires deep familiarity with the first installment.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-66554-265-4
Page Count: 650
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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