An immersive and thoughtful account of an FBI agent’s professional and personal travails.
A debut murder mystery chronicles an emotionally addled FBI agent’s pursuit of a serial killer.
Jennifer Abbott, a young college student, goes missing—a story that attracts national attention—and when her body is found, FBI agent Regan Ross is asked to assist in the investigation. This murder is a particularly grisly one, and Ross suspects that this isn’t the perpetrator’s first. Also, the killer purposely leaves clues on a geocaching website, a taunting challenge to law enforcement. After Ross speaks to forensic psychologist Dr. Sheridan Rourke—she’s visiting Quantico to deliver a special lecture—the agent becomes convinced that the same man who killed Abbott is responsible for a string of murders in Northern Ireland. Meanwhile, Ross is relentlessly hounded by Monica Spears, a reporter intent on interviewing her about her traumatic past. Horn builds the story around Ross’ complex character—a brilliant expert at geographic profiling, she served with distinction in the Army in Iraq. Ross also suffers deeply from the untimely deaths of her parents, a loss she refuses to confront but that still stubbornly haunts her. Her authentic emotions and eccentricity—she’s a martial arts expert who owns a vintage Porsche—lend plausibility to the narrative as a whole. Her pain is depicted delicately—the reader will likely be relieved when she’s ordered by her superior to see a psychotherapist. But the personal drama that parallels the crime story can be gratuitously intricate. For example, Ross’ sister, Erin, a single parent, ends up entangled in a romantic relationship with Rourke. Ross only discovered her sister was a lesbian after Erin’s daughter, Lanie, was nearly killed in a brutal assault by a group of teens. And Rourke’s former lover might also have been a victim of the serial killer while he was still in Northern Ireland. While artfully depicted, these narrative complications can seem contrived and distract from the murder mystery’s march to resolution. But the hunt for the killer—particularly the science of criminal investigation—is described with impressive expertise and verve. The unusual braiding of sensitive, personal drama with a crime tale is inventive, if sometimes overdone, and generally makes for a gripping read.
An immersive and thoughtful account of an FBI agent’s professional and personal travails.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 341
Publisher: Perpetuity Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2017
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
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