Ample diverting characters and story for a prospective—and welcome—return to Tina’s neighborhood.
In first-time novelist Duff’s thriller, a stay-at-home mom uses her skills as a former investigative journalist to find a story, beginning with her curt, suspicious neighbor.
Tina Thomas lost her Washington Post job five years ago after the FBI determined her attempt to stop a bomber blowing up an abortion clinic resulted in his detonating the bomb prematurely. Still suffering the occasional PTSD attack, Tina’s now living in Chicago with her husband, Carter, an editor at the Chicago Tribune, and their 2-year-old daughter, Kerry. Bored by her monthly column at a local newspaper, she’s always looking for a story that could reignite her career. She may have one with her new neighbor, who slams his door shut on her and her welcome-to-the-neighborhood cookies. A bit of research reveals that a corporation owns the house where men are unloading numerous boxes labeled “computer screens.” Tina’s investigation, taking her to a strip club (the Twenties) and dumpster diving, necessitates the inclusion of friends, from attorney Linda Misle to spinning instructor Cassandra “Cas” Olson. The neighborhood, meanwhile, is rife with other story possibilities: a standoffish Israeli doctor couple and a dentist with a predilection for Twenties dancers. Something ultimately directs Tina to a scheme that threatens the people she loves—and quite a few more. Despite the suburban setting’s potential for drollness, Duff’s novel generally takes itself seriously. Obstacles, for one, are minimal, thanks to the moms’ unquestionable prowess: Tina can bypass security systems and locked doors; Linda’s a proficient hacker; and Cas is the muscle. Likewise, the mother-daughter dynamic is endearing in its authenticity. Kerry’s toddler vernacular is cute (“Stwike out!”), repeated potty fails are less so. The narrative maintains an impressive momentum with myriad scenes of dialogue and concise chapters. At the same time, it relies heavily on coincidence, especially once plot strands and individuals start connecting. Nevertheless, the ending triumphs, realistically showing that resolving every aspect of an investigation isn’t feasible.
Ample diverting characters and story for a prospective—and welcome—return to Tina’s neighborhood.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5486-8610-9
Page Count: 438
Publisher: K,M,& M Publishers, INC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.
The master of modern horror returns with a loose-knit parapsychological thriller that touches on territory previously explored in Firestarter and Carrie.
Tim Jamieson is a man emphatically not in a hurry. As King’s (The Outsider, 2018, etc.) latest opens, he’s bargaining with a flight attendant to sell his seat on an overbooked run from Tampa to New York. His pockets full, he sticks out his thumb and winds up in the backwater South Carolina town of DuPray (should we hear echoes of “pray”? Or “depraved”?). Turns out he’s a decorated cop, good at his job and at reading others (“You ought to go see Doc Roper,” he tells a local. “There are pills that will brighten your attitude”). Shift the scene to Minneapolis, where young Luke Ellis, precociously brilliant, has been kidnapped by a crack extraction team, his parents brutally murdered so that it looks as if he did it. Luke is spirited off to Maine—this is King, so it’s got to be Maine—and a secret shadow-government lab where similarly conscripted paranormally blessed kids, psychokinetic and telepathic, are made to endure the Skinnerian pain-and-reward methods of the evil Mrs. Sigsby. How to bring the stories of Tim and Luke together? King has never minded detours into the unlikely, but for this one, disbelief must be extra-willingly suspended. In the end, their forces joined, the two and their redneck allies battle the sophisticated secret agents of The Institute in a bloodbath of flying bullets and beams of mental energy (“You’re in the south now, Annie had told these gunned-up interlopers. She had an idea they were about to find out just how true that was"). It’s not King at his best, but he plays on current themes of conspiracy theory, child abuse, the occult, and Deep State malevolence while getting in digs at the current occupant of the White House, to say nothing of shadowy evil masterminds with lisps.
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-1056-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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