An often-riveting exploration of power and the antiheroes in its service.
Mann offers a slow-burning espionage thriller set at the intersection of high-tech power and personal vulnerability.
Suzanna Oxenburg appears to be living a secluded life in her modern home on the outskirts of the Arizona desert. Her husband, a database specialist, is off on another work trip in Brazil for a health-education program. She appears stuck in an isolated routine, working a tedious, mostly remote job as a database analyst with an overbearing boss in a neighborhood built on privacy—and without cell phone towers. While taking her German shepherd out for a walk during a desert storm, she stumbles across an armed man on the ground; he’s been shot. The perspective then shifts to the man in question, a caustic character who’s utterly suspicious of his rescuer’s seemingly random act of kindness. Although the prose teeters toward an enemies-to-lovers dynamic, it quickly establishes an ambivalent tension around the characters’ motives, as well as the circumstances surrounding their meeting. The man, wounded but refusing treatment, soon coerces Suzanna into a variety of peculiar tasks, including cleaning his clothes and even attending a wedding under his militant supervision. From there, the storyline sends the pair in different directions before bringing them back together to resolve the fragmented pieces of the story. Mann’s dialogue shines through—at its strongest, it’s bitter and comical (“How had he ever stumbled into this hornet’s nest of suburbia?”) with some well-placed one-liners. The opening’s desolate Arizona backdrop also powerfully establishes an atmosphere of isolation: “She dressed, as usual, at the windows, although her view was hidden by clouds this morning.” The evocative setting later falters, struggling to sustain the same level of seamless integration into the narrative, although the anxiousness of the characters and the looming influence of technologies carry a feeling of unease to the end.
An often-riveting exploration of power and the antiheroes in its service.Pub Date: July 26, 2024
ISBN: 9798990792104
Page Count: 397
Publisher: Principle Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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