A tense, cautionary page-turner from start to finish, with well-defined protagonists and some riveting scenes.
A young coed from a prestigious Vermont college goes missing, and the local police suspect her boyfriend is guilty of foul play in Ames’ (All about the Greater Good, 2016) chilling novel.
Eighteen-year-old Shannon Dawson disappeared after attending an off-campus party celebrating the end of the school year’s first semester. Her 20-year-old boyfriend, Keenan Brody, was also seen at the party, but nobody recalls them leaving together. Police officer Dustin Shores is “stuck” with trying to track down someone he sees as “some prima donna college student.” But after he has a phone conversation with Keenan, Dustin becomes convinced that the freshman hockey star is hiding something. All of Shannon’s friends have returned home for winter break and are scattered around the country, so Dustin conducts his first round of interviews by phone. By the time he’s able to meet with them personally in January, they’ve all been communicating with one another via texts and social media. Like the old children’s game of telephone, they begin to “remember” and report things that may or may not have happened. Ames moves the third-person narrative back and forth between the present investigation, which eventually leads to Keenan’s trial, and several months earlier, from when Shannon and Keenan first met to the fateful day of her disappearance. The author portrays Dustin as a decent cop who unconsciously transcribes witness statements with just a whiff of bias; Shannon is depicted as a normal coed, gradually testing her wings, and Keenan as a young guy ensnared in events spinning out of control. The book focuses on the frightening consequences of law enforcement officials’ tunnel vision and the pernicious influence of social media and rumor. Ames spent 12 years working in Vermont’s criminal justice system, including four as a part-time prosecutor, so she understands how the system works. In this compelling work of fiction, she lays out the steps by which even good people may be swayed by fear, subtle innuendo, and pressure to hold someone responsible for a tragedy.
A tense, cautionary page-turner from start to finish, with well-defined protagonists and some riveting scenes.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 429
Publisher: Catamount Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2016
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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