Seeking revenge, restless tree spirits wage war against a small Wisconsin town in Trier’s action-packed fantasy debut.
Not long after losing his wife, Tom Kessler retires from the FBI and takes a job as police chief in Wishbone, Wisconsin. He quickly incurs the wrath of cop Quinn Oetting, who was passed over for chief, and Quinn’s pal Jimmy Mickey, the town bully who doesn’t seem to like anyone. But in the forest, seething with hatred, lies Drak, a tree spirit with a desire to kill humans for their destruction of trees. Drak’s unique ability to control humans is intensified when professor Clifford Rains runs experiments with his cold fusion reactor. Promising to quench Mickey’s thirst for power, Drak enlists him to help Rains complete his reactor and assemble an army so that Drak and the dark spirits can wipe out humanity. Trier’s novel is a consistent blend of thriller and fantasy, building up to an inevitable confrontation between good and evil without dwelling on the supernatural element. Kindred tree spirits warn Kessler of Drak’s plan, but it’s the wicked spirits that leave an impression, especially the rendition of a red-eyed Drak with a knotted, humanlike face. Trier excels at establishing the townspeople, including Mickey as the indisputable villain (he revels in others’ pain) and nuances such as a couple engaged in a marital affair. The book more than earns its climax, a rousing showdown filled with gunfire, exploding bombs and cars in “a deadly game of demolition derby.” Even a family, the Elders, introduced late in the story, will garner reader sympathy and support when Drak’s minions besiege their hardwood home. Trier adds a touch of romance for Kessler with the inclusion of Mora Meyers, Rains’ assistant, but it’s unfortunately underdeveloped; part-time officer, newish mom and already married Dottie Wilkinson, on the other hand, proves to be an indelible, charming character. The novel does have a few stumbles along the way: Grammatical mishaps rear their ugly heads throughout, and awkward sentences—“Olson also told Kessler about Dottie Wilkinson, he described her as a 40 year old female and Wishbone’s part-time Police Officer”—lessen some of the story’s descriptive prose, particularly in the rapidly paced final act.
Despite minor shortcomings, a cornucopia of action and character interplay for readers to savor.
Pub Date: March 30, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 213
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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