Readers will surely welcome a series that features these whip-smart sleuths.
In Scuefield’s (Short Days, Long Nights, 2018) mystery, two Chicago private eyes find that a missing girl in Louisiana may be connected to a string of disappearances.
After retiring as a Chicago homicide detective, 63-year-oldRobert Raines has been determined to focus on his wife, Elena. However, he can’t stop trying to solve old, unsolved cases, so the couple separates after 42 years of marriage. Soon, Raines and fellow 60-something retiree Dale Gamble manage to close a few cold cases, which leads the pair to open RDC Private Investigations along with Cendalius Ashe, a combat veteran whose possible PTSD may have been why he left the forceatthe age of 44. Less than a month after they open the new business, Raines agrees to help out the McAllisters, his brother-in-law’s friends, in Alexandria, Louisiana. They say that their granddaughter, Cecilia, has been missing for three weeks, so Raines and Gamble head south, where the Alexandria police are surprisingly accommodating. The local cops arrest someone who’d threatened Cecilia, but the PIs think they’ve got the wrong man. Their investigation soon takes them to tiny Pollock, Louisiana, where the sheriff is less friendly than Alexandria law enforcement. Pollock police officer Dakota Quinn, however, has connected three missing person cases in town. All of the missing had responded to ads via a trading app,which Cecilia had also used. Raines, Gamble, and Quinn look into the app further, which makes someone nervous enough to fire a gun at them. Meanwhile, a serial killer from one of Raines’ unsolved cases may be stalking people in Alexandria.
The story introduces the kidnapper to readers early on, but Scuefield still keeps the tale shrouded in mystery. For example, readers only gradually learn about the abductor’s connection to numerous women who disappeared over an eight-year period; they also find out about someone who’s providing the kidnapper with assistance. The villain’s perspective provides some unsettling, occasionally violent sequences. Meanwhile, Raines is shown to be a cool, appealing protagonist who admits his faults—perhaps rightly blaming himself for his marriage’s dissolution. His similarity to Gamble curiously highlights Raines’ shortcomings: They’re both former cops and often think alike, but the still-married Gamble, who’s three years older, looks considerably younger than Raines. Nevertheless, Ashe and Quinn prove to be far more intriguing characters; Ashe, who joins the investigation later, is able and shrewd but has a more flexible moral code than his partners do, and Quinn, who gets no respect from her boss and her peers, ultimately uncovers the case’s most substantial pieces of evidence. Readers learn relatively little about Gamble’s background, but the author may explore it in future, planned series installments. Scuefield’s sharp prose smoothly shifts through various first- and third-person perspectives, including Quinn’s, Raines’, and even those of a few victims and victims-to-be. He also manages to skillfully incorporate Robert’s unsolved cold case, and although the story’s wrap-up feels hasty, it still offers readers a satisfying resolution.
Readers will surely welcome a series that features these whip-smart sleuths.Pub Date: May 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64531-070-9
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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