Taut suspense undermined by hard-to-believe moments and absurd interior monologue.
A woman—pursued by a serial killer she identified—becomes enmeshed in romantic entanglements.
Cassandra Nelson seems to be on the fast track to success. She landed a great job at a bank in the financial district of San Francisco and moves into a new apartment in Nob Hill with a roommate, Laura. Shortly after Cassandra moves in, Laura is brutally murdered, and Cassandra provides a sketch of a murder suspect, which circulates throughout the city. Nick, the deranged killer, sees the sketch and vows revenge. Meanwhile, Cassandra leaves her apartment and her job, moves to Marin County, and goes back to school to study civil engineering. But Nick finds her, leaving a pile of bodies behind him. Cassandra falls for Lt. Daniel Charles Fritz, the lead detective on Laura’s case, but she also becomes involved with Matthew Kline, the defense attorney for Nick once he’s finally apprehended. Brand (The Perfect Socialite in Pacific Heights, 2017) focuses equally on Cassandra’s romantic foibles and the murder; Brand leapfrogs from one painfully predictable disaster to another. Also, she furnishes a complex psychological profile of Nick, a man deeply disturbed by the love/hate relationship he has with a narcissistic mother. The pace moves at a frenetic sprint, and there is no shortage of action leading up to a violently climactic denouement. Several plot points, however, are flat-out unbelievable. At one point, Nick lures Cassandra back to his apartment (he’s in disguise and poses as a fellow classmate), where he drugs and rapes her. She doesn’t recognize him, permits herself to be paired with him on a school project afterward, and returns to his apartment yet again. Also, the writing can be almost comically overwrought: “What should I do? she wondered. Will he think I’m easy, if I say yes? We haven’t even had a date. What would my Mom think?”
Taut suspense undermined by hard-to-believe moments and absurd interior monologue.Pub Date: March 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4969-7396-2
Page Count: 324
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying...
King (Under the Dome, 2009, etc.) adds counterfactual historian to his list of occupations.
Well, not exactly: The author is really turning in a sturdy, customarily massive exercise in time travel that just happens to involve the possibility of altering history. Didn’t Star Trek tell us not to do that? Yes, but no matter: Up in his beloved Maine, which he celebrates eloquently here (“For the first time since I’d topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Dery hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy”), King follows his own rules. In this romp, Jake Epping, a high-school English teacher (vintage King, that detail), slowly comes to see the opportunity to alter the fate of a friend who, in one reality, is hale and hearty but in another dying of cancer, no thanks to a lifetime of puffing unfiltered cigarettes. Epping discovers a time portal tucked away in a storeroom—don’t ask why there—and zips back to 1958, where not just his friend but practically everyone including the family pets smokes: “I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by.” A different world indeed: In this one, Jake, a sort of sad sack back in Reality 1, finds love and a new identity in Reality 2. Not just that, but he now sees an opportunity to unmake the past by inserting himself into some ugly business involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, various representatives of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and JFK in Dallas in the fall of 1963. It would be spoiling things to reveal how things turn out; suffice it to say that any change in Reality 2 will produce a change in Reality 1, not to mention that Oswald may have been a patsy, just as he claimed—or maybe not. King’s vision of one outcome of the Kennedy assassination plot reminds us of what might have been—that is, almost certainly a better present than the one in which we’re all actually living. “If you want to know what political extremism can lead to,” warns King in an afterword, “look at the Zapruder film.”
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying yarn.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2728-2
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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