Wait till next year, when the normally reliable Perry is bound to come up trumps again.
Finally, a tale that answers the unwelcome question: Is it possible for suspense master Perry (Nightlife, 2006, etc.) to write a routine thriller?
Following the suspicious disappearance of one of restaurateur Wendy Harper’s waitresses six years ago, a brush with an assailant’s baseball bat persuaded her that it was time to do some disappearing of her own. Now recently discovered evidence has implicated her ex-partner/ex-fiancé Eric Fuller in her murder, and the only way to clear him is to get her to come forward. It’s obvious to everyone but the LAPD and the prosecutor that the evidence is a plant specifically designed to flush her out of hiding. But Jack Till, the ex-cop private eye who helped her vanish, feels he has no choice but to hunt her down and bring her back. So far so breathless, and Perry’s first set piece, which brings husband-and-wife hit team Paul and Sylvie Turner to Las Vegas in search of their target, is a beaut. But then things start to go wrong—not for Jack or Wendy, but for readers in search of thrills. The assassins waste their energy in conjugal spats (“Let’s kill them now and rent a room”). Perry, whose control of pace is usually unequaled, begins to clutter the story with so many flashbacks providing unnecessary information about his leads that you wonder if you’re going to hear about the car-rental agent’s childhood. As both Jack and the killers close in on Wendy, the suspense wanes instead of building. After spending half his story ignoring the question of why someone still wants Wendy dead after six years, the obliging author crosses every T of the mastermind’s identity and motivation, utterly demystifying him in the process. As they approach the finish line, the killers are more bedeviled than the heroes.
Wait till next year, when the normally reliable Perry is bound to come up trumps again.Pub Date: July 2, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-15-101289-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Otto Penzler/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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