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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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