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
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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