A character-driven story with traces of comedy, as in Stich’s first novel, but more polished and self-assured.
In Stich’s second thriller featuring the Afterlife Society (The Assassination Race, 2013, etc.), members race to stop an apparently possessed man from revealing details of the secret society, only to find something far more sinister at work.
Edward Bloodgood, the new and inexperienced king of a society that promotes street racing to maintain interplanetary peace, has a problem: He fired some great racers because they were hardened criminals, and now the extraterrestrial investors are bored. He tracks down the racers and learns that one, Vinny, is institutionalized, levitating objects and exhibiting the effects of a demonic possession. Meanwhile, Nikolas, leader of the Knights, a motorcycle gang, assists the society in locating Vinny and is also enlisted to protect his pal Fernando, a congressman who’s scared for his life and experiencing strange convulsions. Edward and racer Deidra soon realize there are strange goings-on, and it may have to do with Fernando. Stich, as in her previous book, injects a good deal of humor. But this time, Edward’s denseness is more endearing and more comical, for instance, his mangling Deidra’s metaphor on the difficulty of finding new racers: They’re “as easy to replace as a catalytic converter without the right ramp thing and something about bolts.” Fully drawn characters and ample dramatic interaction add to the pleasure, as do aliens and, as the title playfully teases, a wolf. Characters are often entrenched in melodrama, such as Deidra’s former lover, Nikolas, whose presence forces Edward to reassess his relationship with her. Likewise, Deidra is torn between the two men. The author knows how to turn details into images—a priest riding a Harley is particularly memorable. Farce regularly acts as a counterpoint to many of the more serious moments; Edward’s powerful status among the others is sometimes in question as he fumbles orders, but Deidra, when recruiting help, bolsters the man’s authority with a hysterical warning that an angry Edward is prone to using a corkscrew as a weapon.
A character-driven story with traces of comedy, as in Stich’s first novel, but more polished and self-assured.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 205
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2014
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
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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