Book 10 of Green's series boldly fleshes out the hero’s origin story to fine effect.
An Earth-acculturated alien’s fragmentary memories encourage him to learn more about where he came from.
In all his years as an alien on Earth, Ishmael Jones has never come as close to discovering the truth of his origins as in his most recent case, when he was visited by recollections of his early years. Could it be that Ishmael wasn’t alone when his spaceship crashed to Earth? Drawing on his dreams, visions, and superior alien senses, Ishmael has done what he can to piece together his background, but his real hope lies in his long-term association with the Organization, a vaguely purposed group for whom he’s been solving a variety of supernatural mysteries over the years. The Organization has information on Ishmael’s past that leads him and Penny Belcourt, his partner in life and work, to hop a train from London to little Norton Hedley. Once there, Ishmael and Penny seek out virtually unknown author Vincent Smith, whose low-profile lifestyle seems incongruent with their intel that he may have been Ishmael’s traveling companion. But, in a shock that seems unsurprising even to Ishmael and Penny, Vincent suddenly dies the day before their arrival. Instead of connecting with Vincent, Ishmael and Penny are welcomed by Lucy Parker, an employee of Black Heir, perhaps the only organization whose purpose is more amorphous than that of the Organization, and definitely more nefarious. Ishmael and Penny must shake their new friend, who they suspect is more a tail than anything else, and discover the truth about Vincent if they have any chance of learning about Ishmael’s origin.
Book 10 of Green's series boldly fleshes out the hero’s origin story to fine effect.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7278-9032-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.
The master of supernatural disaster returns with four horror-laced novellas.
The protagonist of the title story, Holly Gibney, is by King’s own admission one of his most beloved characters, a “quirky walk-on” who quickly found herself at the center of some very unpleasant goings-on in End of Watch, Mr. Mercedes, and The Outsider. The insect-licious proceedings of the last are revisited, most yuckily, while some of King’s favorite conceits turn up: What happens if the dead are never really dead but instead show up generation after generation, occupying different bodies but most certainly exercising their same old mean-spirited voodoo? It won’t please TV journalists to know that the shape-shifting bad guys in that title story just happen to be on-the-ground reporters who turn up at very ugly disasters—and even cause them, albeit many decades apart. Think Jack Torrance in that photo at the end of The Shining, and you’ve got the general idea. “Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same,” King writes, “and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard.” In the careful-what-you-wish-for department, Rat is one of those meta-referential things King enjoys: There are the usual hallucinatory doings, a destiny-altering rodent, and of course a writer protagonist who makes a deal with the devil for success that he thinks will outsmart the fates. No such luck, of course. Perhaps the most troubling story is the first, which may cause iPhone owners to rethink their purchases. King has gone a far piece from the killer clowns and vampires of old, with his monsters and monstrosities taking on far more quotidian forms—which makes them all the scarier.
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.Pub Date: April 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3797-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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