A lively but overly complex story about the lives and loves of some unfulfilled Philadelphians.
A bored technical writer in an unhappy marriage tries to disappear, but his father-in-law has a private investigator hot on his trail in this debut novel.
Tim Adams used to be a PR executive at Courtland Chemical Industries. But after attempting to expose CEO Richard King’s malfeasance, Tim was relegated to the tedious world of the technical writing department. He does not love his new role (“Working at Courtland Chemical Industries was as toxic as the deadly substances he wrote about”), and to make matters worse, the obnoxious new PR guy mercilessly taunts Tim about his demotion. Things are no better at home, where Tim’s wife, Angelica, is as miserable in the marriage as he is. He married into a tough-as-nails Italian American family in Philadelphia that’s headed by patriarch Luciano Dante, owner of the storied restaurant Dante’s Italia. Luciano isn’t happy with Tim either. He wants Angelica to take over the business upon his retirement, but she has no interest in doing the work required, and Luciano feels things would be easier with Tim out of the way. Just as Tim is taking out personal ads under the pseudonym Adonis, Luciano hires a private detective, hoping to catch his son-in-law having an affair. As it happens, Tim is planning to leave town with one of his children and vanish, but he ends up being followed by not just the PI, but also by federal officials. In his zeal to assume a new identity, his counterfeiters made him an unwitting credit-card fraud mule, and Tim’s disappearing act has made him a prime target. What seemed like a meticulously planned trip into the unknown has now turned into a high-wire act that puts his future in serious jeopardy. DeSanto’s briskly told story has vivid elements of family drama and mystery, snappy dialogue, and a variety of interconnected plot points. Though it is clear that Tim’s tale is the central one in the novel, some of the storylines are unnecessary or lead to overcomplication (the problems at Courtland Chemical alone, for example, are enough to sustain the book). As it is, though, the family issues and Tim’s escape have terrific details and believable characters, and the addition of a little cloak-and-dagger action makes the tale even more compelling.
A lively but overly complex story about the lives and loves of some unfulfilled Philadelphians.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2020
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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