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Winter

A CROW CREEK NOVEL

Another surefire horror outing with realistic heroes from a new specialist in the genre.

Awards & Accolades

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This third installment of a series examines apocalyptic events in the heart of the American South.

Picking up where his previous book left off, Drago (Queensboro, 2015, etc.) returns to the small and seemingly ordinary North Carolina town of Crow Creek, the center of that earlier adventure, and to several characters from that horror tale, including Sheriff Brad Gleason, his ex-wife Shana, and “a certain band of inadequate heroes” who’d saved the day (and quite possibly the world). As this new novel opens, twin catastrophes are looming: first, Amanda Simmons, the nefarious owner of the ambitiously evil biotech company Carolina Entech, plots to rebuild the neighboring town of Winter, which was hit by two atomic bombs back in 1960. Second, just as the plot begins to unfold, Drago’s extended cast of characters—Pastor Thomas Rhodes, a man named Black Jesus, Pastor Aken, Britisher Peter Bally, and a handful of others—gets caught up in a strange, sudden phenomenon: an energy pulse that knocks out all technology in one pregnant instant (“like a stage actor in the West End holding a beat for dramatic effect,” as Peter characterizes it). Gleason and Rhodes, having been tasked by the U.S. government with investigating the goings-on in Winter, must deal with ancient cults, corporate evil, and the walking dead. It’s the kind of overheated stew Drago seems to enjoy preparing, and he once again does a winning, skillful job, combining increasingly over-the-top, Stephen King-style horror elements with a quietly confident and quite convincing portrait of everyday life in the North Carolina Piedmont region. His heroes are believable strivers with feet of clay, and his ear for the rhythms of their dialogue helps to bring them alive. And as in the previous Crow Creek work, the book’s villains are energetically drawn and its sense of evil itself is both starkly Baptist and refreshingly complicated (“That’s what the Devil does,” readers are told at one point. “Don’t so much as go for you as make you go for him”).

Another surefire horror outing with realistic heroes from a new specialist in the genre.

Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-692-78280-4

Page Count: 420

Publisher: Gold Avenue Press

Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

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THE GOOD HOUSE

Despite getting a little preachy toward the end, Leary has largely achieved a genuinely funny novel about alcoholism.

A supposedly recovering alcoholic real estate agent tells her not-exactly-trustworthy version of life in her small New England town in this tragicomic novel by Leary (Outtakes from a Marriage, 2008, etc.).

Sixty-year-old Hildy Good, a divorced realtor who has lived all her life in Wendover on the Massachusetts North Shore, proudly points to having an ancestor burned at the stake at the Salem witch trials. In fact, her party trick is to do psychic readings using subtle suggestions and observational skills honed by selling homes. At first, the novel seems to center on Hildy’s insights about her Wendover neighbors, particularly her recent client Rebecca McAllister, a high-strung young woman who has moved into a local mansion with her businessman husband and two adopted sons. Hildy witnesses Rebecca having trouble fitting in with other mothers, visiting the local psychiatrist Peter Newbold, who rents an office above Hildy’s, and winning a local horse show on her expensive new mount. Hildy is acerbically funny and insightful about her neighbors; many, like her, are from old families whose wealth has evaporated. She becomes Rebecca’s confidante about the affair Rebecca is having with Peter, whom Hildy helped baby-sit when he was a lonely child. She helps another family who needs to sell their house to afford schooling for their special needs child. She begins an affair with local handyman Frankie Getchell, with whom she had a torrid romance as a teenager. But Hildy, who has recently spent a stint in rehab and joined AA after an intervention by her grown daughters, is not quite the jolly eccentric she appears. There are those glasses of wine she drinks alone at night, those morning headaches and memory lapses that are increasing in frequency. As both Rebecca’s and Hildy’s lives spin out of control, the tone darkens until it approaches tragedy. Throughout, Hildy is original, irresistibly likable and thoroughly untrustworthy.

Despite getting a little preachy toward the end, Leary has largely achieved a genuinely funny novel about alcoholism.

Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-250-01554-9

Page Count: 304

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012

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THE ISLAND

Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It”...

Queen of the summer novel—how could she not be, with all her stories set on an island—Hilderbrand delivers a beguiling ninth (The Castaways, 2009, etc.), featuring romance and mystery on isolated Tuckernuck Island.

The Tate family has had a house on Tuckernuck (just off the coast of swanky Nantucket) for generations. It has been empty for years, but now Birdie wants to spend a quiet mother-daughter week there with Chess before Chess’s wedding to Michael Morgan. Then the unthinkable happens—perfect Chess (beautiful, rich, well-bred food editor of Glamorous Home) dumps the equally perfect Michael. She quits her job, leaves her New York apartment for Birdie’s home in New Canaan, and all without explanation. Then the unraveling continues: Michael dies in a rock-climbing accident, leaving Chess not quite a widow, but devastated, guilty, unreachable in the shell of herself. Birdie invites her younger daughter Tate (a pretty, naïve computer genius) and her own bohemian sister India, whose husband, world-renowned sculptor Bill Bishop, killed himself years ago, to Tuckernuck for the month of July, in the hopes that the three of them can break through to Chess. Hunky Barrett Lee is their caretaker, coming from Nantucket twice a day to bring groceries and take away laundry (idyllic Tuckernuck is remote—no phone, no hot water, no ferry) as he’s also inspiring renewed lust in Tate, who has had a crush on him since she was a kid. The author jumps between the four women—Tate and her blossoming relationship with Barrett, India and her relationship with Lula Simpson, a painter at the Academy where India is a curator, Birdie, who is surprised by the recent kindnesses of ex-husband Grant, and finally Chess, who in her journal is uncoiling the sordid, sad circumstances of her break with normal life and Michael’s death.

Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It” beach book of the summer.

Pub Date: July 6, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-316-04387-8

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010

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