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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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