Jones reminds us that there’s a lot to be outraged about these days.
A green reporter and her coldblooded editor go after a big, misogynistic fish in Jones’ #MeToo–era thriller.
Interviewing for a job at the powerful tabloid The Globe is a dream come true for Jess Townsend; she’s miles away from the local paper where she cut her journalistic teeth. After one uncomfortable moment with Max Forsythe, the editor, she learns that he's going to hire her because she seems to have a moral compass, and Max is looking to steer the paper out of its nasty-gossip–infested waters into the world of more serious journalism. This is news, however, to Stella Thorne, the deputy editor who ruthlessly sets up stings to catch celebrities in flagrante delicto, and to the owner, Peter Kingsley, who just wants the money to keep rolling in. When Jess is forced to help set up a young actress in a fake drug bust, she can hardly live with herself; then, a hot reality TV star becomes the target of the paper, and a false story about her having an affair leads to her death by suicide. As Jess begins to reckon with this tragedy and her own role in it, she stumbles onto a much bigger story about a wealthy tycoon who has been drugging and raping young women for years. It just so happens that Stella has personal reasons to believe Jess and the motive, therefore, to team up with her to take down the bastard once and for all. But the corruption at the paper runs deep, and Jess and Stella's quest for justice is mostly unfulfilled, though there's some hope in the end. Jones unapologetically stares down the ugliness of the modern media and its coldblooded exploitation of celebrities to benefit those truly in power, as well as the rampages of fake news. It’s a novel that couldn’t exist without #MeToo, but it falls short of its desired impact—it’s too busy prioritizing thrills over character development. Stella has the biggest awakening, “realiz[ing] that all she's ever done is what powerful men have wanted her to do”; Jess exists mainly to offer her a mirror but contributes little complexity or humanity to the narrative.
Jones reminds us that there’s a lot to be outraged about these days.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781250836939
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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