Entertaining enough. Still, in the words of the golem, who’s bound to turn up in the next installment, if current trends...
A supernatural slugfest that aspires to be literature but collapses under its own weight.
In calculus, the derivative of a derivative is a—well, a tangent gone astray. So it is with this book, which echoes many, many others without quite finding its own way. A wolf running wild in Central Park? Jim Harrison, check. Shape-shifters versus the children of the night? Charlaine Harris, check. Secret rituals of the Catholic Church exposed? Dan Brown, check. And let’s not forget James Fenimore Cooper. If this were parody, all would be forgiven. Assuming best-case homage, the project is still a curious one; one supposes it’s a mortgage-paying enterprise for Cabot (Blood of the Lamb, 2013)—the pseudonym of Carlos Dew, a literature professor in Rome, and S.J. Rozan, a crime fiction writer in Brooklyn—and not an effort to break new ground and/or raise the bar in the realm of supernatural fiction. That said, the storytelling is competent, with all the requisite window-rattling portents: “Natural order would be restored, ancient wrongs would be righted. It would take time; but once it began it could not be stopped any more than a raging fire could be hounded back into lightning in the sky.” Hounded: a tasty word for a loup-garou, that. The wolves who are men wish to take possession of a certain object to help the transformation along, but the vampires, some of whom are perpetual grad students, being undead and unpressed for time and all, seem determined to get in the way, as do the human scholars, priests, and assorted cops and civilians who get bound up in the tale. A useful takeaway: If you should happen to become a vampire, it’s easy to outlive your Social Security payments, so take a thought lest you find yourself “facing eternity penniless.” And did we mention the soupçon of Braveheart at the end of the whole shebang?
Entertaining enough. Still, in the words of the golem, who’s bound to turn up in the next installment, if current trends hold: Meh.Pub Date: July 31, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16296-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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