A fast-paced, if occasionally silly, thriller about memory loss and revenge.
Danley (The Tipping Point, 2015) returns to the adventures of novelist Garth Wainwright in this new mystery.
Wainwright is enjoying an Austrian honeymoon with his new wife, lawyer Lacey Kincaid, when the sudden and mysterious death of his brother Bobby forces them to return early to California. While Wainwright drives home from Bobby’s funeral through Topanga Canyon, his car is violently forced off the road by an unexpectedly aggressive Mercedes. The culprits, employees of a shadowy criminal enterprise, abscond with the unconscious Lacey, whose body is thrown from the wreck. Wainwright is left for dead. When he comes to in the hospital, his jaw wired and his bones broken, he has no memory—not of the recent events, and not even of his life before them: “He had no understanding of where he was or why he was there….When a person loses his memory, how can he know that he no longer has what he doesn’t remember he’s lost?” Around the same time, mob boss Marcos Murtagh leaves prison after 13 years. His first order of business is revenge, and he has two targets: Lacey, the lawyer who got him locked up, and Ariel Amriti, “the Assassin,” who murdered Murtagh’s son. As Wainwright attempts to use the clues of his present to reassemble the fragments of his past, his and Murtagh’s stories begin to intertwine. The novelist will be forced to use all his skills and resources to uncover the plot and save his wife, before all that he has lost mentally becomes physically lost as well. Danley is an adept storyteller, and the tale unfurls at a pace that keeps the reader pressing forward. The plot begins in a place of incredulity and moves ever further in that direction, but thankfully the author doesn’t take himself so seriously that the less realistic elements of the story sink it. Genre fans should enjoy this offering, which relishes in its own twists and tropes. Danley has not reinvented the wheel, but he’s produced a functional tale that will likely keep his audience intrigued all the way to the end.
A fast-paced, if occasionally silly, thriller about memory loss and revenge.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 260
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2016
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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