A very impressive, engagingly written first novel.
A debut novel featuring a heroine with bipolar disorder, her tortured relationships, and the beautiful flora and fauna of Kenya.
Sarah and Peter, a wealthy, retired couple from California, have decided to treat themselves to a safari in Africa. At the last minute, however, they ditch an old-line travel company to instead go with the charismatic safari guide Max Einfield. However, during the safari, he’s nabbed for having expired papers and is detained at the notorious Nyayo House in Nairobi, controlled by imposing Kenyan functionaries. Most chapters begin with Sarah’s efforts to free Max and then flash back to the safari itself, which would have been idyllic except for the fact that Max took an inexplicable dislike to Sarah and that Peter was constantly needy, demanding, and irascible. Readers may find themselves fervently wishing that Sarah would strike back against both of them somehow, but she’s struggling with her own emotional problems, including a past suicide attempt, which allows the two men to bully her with impunity. The safari sights, however, prove to be spectacular, and Max does indeed know everything there is to know about animal behaviors. (He’s also a very charming man—except when he’s not.) The trio soon run across Brandon Howard, a world-famous nature photographer. He and Sarah hit it off immediately; clearly, they are soul mates. He pops up again and again during their travels, which is good for Sarah’s soul. Later, she stays on in Kenya by herself—a stay that stretches into weeks, with Sarah feeling increasingly happy and excited as the days go by. Finally, she’s convinced to return to California, where her trusted doctor diagnoses her with bipolar disorder. There’s much to admire in St. John’s debut novel. She has real insight into her characters as well as a wicked talent for turning a phrase: “She found herself trying to please a woman who appeared to bite off satisfaction from her children in tiny morsels, then, finding them unpalatable, spat them out”; “Her pen moves ahead, becoming a small sailing vessel carried along a course determined not by the captain, but by the wind.” At one point, she describes antelope on a road as “bucking at one another like notes of a song rising and then colliding.” More experienced writers would love to have such a gift. And her character sketches of Max and Peter are spot-on: Every little bullying comment from Max and every childish demand from Peter speak volumes about them as people. Sarah’s sadness is poignant and palpable, particularly when she realizes that all the money that she spread around so lavishly in her manic state—to Max, to Brandon, to assorted others—is truly gone for good. Readers may have one cavil, however; it’s not easy to exit a plot and end a book, and what the author does, in this case, may delight some but leave others incredulous. On balance, though, St. John is a promising writer to be encouraged.
A very impressive, engagingly written first novel.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63505-264-0
Page Count: 456
Publisher: MCP Books
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2018
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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