Top-drawer thrills from an author whose hard-nosed hero is as professional as he is.
A Chicago cop–turned–private eye agrees to turn over some rocks in nearby Indiana and finds nasty things under every single one.
U.S. Attorney Ellen Leicester suspects that someone’s gearing up to coordinate and extend midlevel crimes in the area. Since her suspicions aren’t enough to shake loose government funding, she turns to Harry Duncan, whom she hasn’t seen since their marriage ended 15 years ago, for “a scouting mission.” Planning to say no, Duncan says yes instead and goes looking for bad buys in Parkman’s Elbow, Indiana. He doesn’t have to look hard at all, because enterprising bad guys are already looking for him. A pair of them passing themselves off as cops try to get him to pay them off not to tow his car, whose paperwork they claim is irregular, from the parking lot of The Elbow Room. Duncan makes short work of these lowlifes, and the three Clark brothers, who come to extort protection money from Renee Parkman at The Elbow Room, don’t last much longer. But Duncan’s labors are only beginning, for Ellen’s suspicions about the tentacles of organized crime are right on the money. Gerald Russell, a realtor working for faceless overlords in Chicago, is systematically putting pressure on many local establishments, squeezing them for payoffs with the ultimate goal of bankrupting and buying their businesses at a steep discount. Jeanette Walrath, the assassin Russell hires to smooth the rough edges, poses dangers of her own. What worries Duncan most, though, is his sudden inability to get his ex to pick up the phone. Could there be a mole in her own office?
Top-drawer thrills from an author whose hard-nosed hero is as professional as he is.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-61316-383-2
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
IN THE NEWS
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
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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