by Tim Lane ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 2023
A fever dream of the monsters lurking beneath the suburban surface. Not even Mister Rogers would want these neighbors.
Humdrum domestic stresses hatch a flock of wildly florid complications.
Portland ad writer Adam Cooper, fired from his job at Lostine Windows for watching explicit videos at his workplace, is serving as a stay-at-home dad for his 7-month-old daughter, Maddie, while his wife, Sarah, struggles to pump milk each day during her downtime at César Chávez Elementary. Sarah’s unsought role as the family breadwinner is complicated by the unwelcome attention she gets from wealthy, entitled Chávez principal Evie Kemp, whose son, software engineer Crispin Kemp, has just been dumped by the Coopers’ neighbor Ali Washington, a receptionist and aspiring graphic designer who’s started to feel creepy about Crispin’s attentions. Ali’s shivers are the first sign that this apparently quotidian Oregon soap opera is being driven by some seriously dark energy. Ali has taken to posing in her bedroom window late at night to give Adam a private striptease. Crispin, who’s waiting to become a billionaire when Amazon acquires Logicstyx, the company he’s helped steer into the stratosphere, is disturbed in ways his mother can face only to the extent of thinking, “Crispin had gotten carried away again.” Sarah’s hiding secrets just as explosive as those of her husband and her next-door neighbor and the neighbor’s ex-lover. Ultimately, Adam’s ill-judged attempts to protect the wife who’s turned away from him ignite a full-blown blaze. Lane’s fragmentary narrative is constantly jumpy—not just when he’s shifting from one character’s point of view to the next, but even within single sentences like “Marriage is a scoreboard.”
A fever dream of the monsters lurking beneath the suburban surface. Not even Mister Rogers would want these neighbors.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781639104734
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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by Patricia Cornwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 8, 2024
Expert, but unsurprising.
The death of an old friend who was more than a friend sends Dr. Kay Scarpetta down her latest rabbit hole.
If every body tells a story, the corpse of 7-year-old Luna Briley sings the blues. On top of the many signs of ongoing physical abuse, there’s the fatal gunshot wound to her head. Ryder and Piper Briley, the wealthy and powerful parents who didn’t call the police until after their daughter died, insist that Luna’s death was an accident, or maybe a suicide. Scarpetta doesn’t think so, and her refusal to release the body to the Brileys’ hand-picked mortician moves them to legal action against her as Virginia’s chief medical examiner. You’d think it would be a relief to put this case aside for another when Scarpetta’s niece, Secret Service agent Lucy Farinelli, calls her and ferries her by helicopter to an abandoned Oz theme park owned by Ryder Briley, but this one’s even more heartbreaking. Scarpetta is there to examine the body of astrophysicist Sal Giordano, her close friend and former lover, who was evidently kidnapped, held in captivity for several hours, and tossed out of an unidentified aircraft. The leading suspects are the Brileys; Carrie Grethen, Lucy’s sociopathic ex-lover, with whom Scarpetta has repeatedly tangled in the past; and the UFO that dumped Giordano’s body without leaving the usual traces for air-traffic technologies to pick up. The multiple rounds of physical examinations Scarpetta conducts on both victims are every bit as meticulous and gripping as fans would expect; the killer’s identity is neither surprising nor interesting, but Cornwell juggles her trademark forensics, and the paranormal hints she’s become increasingly invested in, more dexterously than usual.
Expert, but unsurprising.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781538770382
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Liane Moriarty ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2024
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
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New York Times Bestseller
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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