A gripping suspense novel set on the remote compound of a bizarre religious community.
A woman in a claustrophobic desert cult searches for a missing runaway in Paine’s debut thriller.
Raine Harkins lives by the Teaching, the religious doctrine that governs the Haven, a small religious community based in remote northern Nevada. She’s still a contented believer, though now that she’s nearly 30, she wishes she had someone to share her life with. “Everyone I grew up with has married or left the Haven,” she narrates, “but I know God will send my soul mate to me. Yet, it’s hard. The men in town don’t understand our way of life, and we’re down to less than ten families in the Haven.” Until then, she just has Java, but her free-spirited dog is prone to taking off into the wilderness. While searching for Java during one such occasion, Raine discovers a teenage girl hiding in the sagebrush. Samantha is a recent addition to the Haven and the newly adopted daughter of Raine’s friends Monica, the daughter of the community’s pastor, and David Johansen, the man Raine wishes she could have married. Samantha bolts, Raine loses sight of her, and gunshots sound among the trees. When Raine returns home that night, she finds a note left on her door in unfamiliar handwriting: “God is watching you. Sooner or later, he’s going to run you down.” Samantha is missing. Another twist: Noah Carlson, the new student of religion who has come to study the Haven, is, unbeknown to its members, actually a private detective sent by Samantha’s birth family to bring her home. As pressures mount from both outside and inside the community, Raine feels compelled to help find the girl. But the threatening messages keep appearing, and the answers she finds force her to begin questioning the Teaching for the first time in her life.
The novel cycles through Raine’s, David’s, and Noah’s perspectives as each attempts to navigate a fraught situation. The prose is urgent and sharp, as here where Noah realizes his job has gotten even trickier: “The news Samantha ran away from the Haven, though, has thrown a wrench in things. He can’t convince her to come back to Las Vegas if she’s gone. He’s not sure what to tell her father. The runaway has run away, and someone was shooting a gun in the woods.” Paine has chosen some wonderfully creepy elements—the desert landscape and the cult’s practices of channeling their guiding spirit, Sebastian, and plastering their Shrine with hundreds of letters to God—but he also treats his characters as complex human personalities. From this emotional mix, the tension builds slowly until it becomes nearly panic inducing. The pages fly by, pulling the reader deeper into the mysterious workings of the Haven. Paine is a talented storyteller and brings the novel to a satisfying conclusion. Readers will look forward to whatever chilling tale he comes up with next.
A gripping suspense novel set on the remote compound of a bizarre religious community.Pub Date: March 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-0999218334
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Dark Swallow Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
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 enjoyable visit with an old character, but not one of Ware’s strongest.
Travel writer Lo Blacklock is back. Ten years after the events of The Woman in Cabin 10 (2016), she's attending the opening of a lavish Swiss hotel when, once again, a mystery intervenes.
A decade after she almost died on a luxury cruise and ended up exposing a murder plot, travel journalist Laura “Lo” Blacklock is trying to get back into the business post-Covid-19 and post–maternity leave. When she's invited to an exclusive hotel launch by the Leidmann Group on the shores of Switzerland’s gorgeous Lake Geneva, her supportive husband, Judah, insists that she should go, and her old boss, Rowan, says that if Lo can score an interview with the reclusive Marcus Leidmann, she’ll publish it in the Financial Times. Leaving Judah and the kids at home in New York, Lo is surprised by a last-minute upgrade to first class, which kicks off her trip in style. The hotel is appropriately awe-inspiring in both scenic location and effortless luxury, and Lo starts to put the memories of last trip’s trauma behind her, thinking that maybe she can just enjoy the experience this time. But then, at dinner, she's surprised to see at least three guests who were also on that original cruise, and when she finds a mysterious note in her room saying "Please come to suite 11 as soon as possible," she gets another shock. To quote William Faulkner, she realizes that “the past is never dead,” and soon Lo is careening across Europe on her way to England, only to find herself embroiled in another murder. The back half of the novel offers her the opportunity to continue her amateur sleuthing, and while she avoids much of the physical danger that plagued her on the cruise a decade ago, she is in very real legal trouble. This is the prolific Ware’s first sequel, and it's fun to spend time with Lo again, as she's both savvy and kindhearted. Unfortunately, the mystery is not as atmospheric and gripping as usual for Ware, though even a lesser Ruth Ware thriller is still worth reading.
An enjoyable visit with an old character, but not one of Ware’s strongest.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781668025628
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
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