A fun, fast-paced novel suitable for readers who appreciate grit, sarcasm, mystery, and dimension-hopping.
In this first installment of a planned series, Perry (Was It a Rat I Saw?, 2013) blurs genre lines, combining a hard-boiled detective story with urban fantasy.
Veronica Static, known to most people as Nica, is a Los Angeles native embarking on a new enterprise as a private detective. Despite her lack of experience, credentials, or license, she manages to acquire three separate cases in one afternoon: a creepy, strung-out couple searching for a duffel bag; a pair of concerned godparents looking for their missing teenage niece; and a wild, ethereal couple, Anya and Anwyl, who simply want Nica to accompany them to a mysterious meeting. As she pursues each of her investigations, the three plot threads begin to overlap. When Nica goes with Anya and Anwyl, she’s dragged into the world of Frames, which are essentially alternate, coexisting universes. She’s soon tasked with helping solve a dispute that, according to Anwyl, threatens all the free Frames. The first of her Frame visits results in her introduction to the local Watts Towers landmarks, which turn out to be sentient. Along with a substitute janitor, Hernandez, she sets out to observe areas where refugees from other Frames wander into her own and determine what imminent threat they might pose. Like any good noir story, the narrative is told from a first-person perspective, and Nica is a chatty narrator with an irreverent, self-deprecating sense of humor. Having a female detective in this genre is a refreshing change from the usual, and the conversational tone of the writing makes it all easily digestible. The fantasy elements are well thought out, though they occasionally overshadow the story’s mystery elements. Perry also has a flair for detailed, unique similes: “When he saw me, he reacted with one of his giant smiles that…lit his eyes like a flashbulb light.”
A fun, fast-paced novel suitable for readers who appreciate grit, sarcasm, mystery, and dimension-hopping.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5032-1290-9
Page Count: 266
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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