Traditional genre trademarks and a stellar backdrop invigorate this tale, the first in a series featuring the whip-smart...
A sleuth in the distant future works a case involving an actress proclaiming her innocence—despite security footage that shows she killed her husband—in this sci-fi mystery.
The world may have mastered light-speed travel and befriended alien species, but old-fashioned private investigators still prove necessary. Percival “Percy” Calendar is hired by Dakamon of Scla, whose client and friend, movie star Audry Parsons, is a murder suspect. Cops’ evidence against her is overwhelming: her home security system captured Audry beating her husband, Roger Gavin, to death with a golf club. Audry says it’s not her, but the sophisticated system can’t be fooled by a look-alike imposter—for example, a clone of the celebrity committing the murder. Percy scours the galactic quadrant for Audry’s potential enemies, including a rival actress and her ex-manager. But his probe soon uncovers a possible link to another case: Jack Layman’s serving a life sentence for killing his wife, but he continues to point the finger at their household android. If someone’s developed tech that can trick security cameras, it won’t be easy for Percy to prove Audry’s innocence. A killer may even be tempted to frame the detective for murder—or target him for death. Despite an expansive plot that takes the private eye to various planets, Riccobono’s (Is There A Medic in the House?, 2017, etc.) novel is a time-honored detective story. Occasionally cynical Percy, for one, drops memorable quips, like his response to Dakamon’s acknowledgement that the damning evidence looks bad: “No, an intergalactic war looks bad. This is worse.” Characters, however, are also well-developed, particularly Percy’s stepdaughter and homicide officer, Cryllin, whom the PI raised after her mother died. Copious interrogations beget a dialogue-heavy narrative; descriptions are short but comprehensive, though sometimes sparse (perhaps a few specifics on sonic handcuffs?). But it’s hard not to admire a private eye who refuses to give up, notwithstanding his client’s belief that the investigation has run its course.
Traditional genre trademarks and a stellar backdrop invigorate this tale, the first in a series featuring the whip-smart gumshoe.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 113
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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