A wild chase with walk-on roles for every lowlife from North Mississippi to New Orleans.
The usual suspects in Tibbehah County have to make room for a new firecracker in town.
Or more precisely, from town, since no sooner does Tanya Jane Byrd realize that she’s the prime suspect in the murder of her no-account mother, Gina, than she takes to the road with her 9-year-old brother, John Wesley, her boyfriend, Ladarius McCade, and her best friend, Holly Harkins, a waitress at the Captain’s Table who’s thoughtful enough to steal her momma’s minivan for the occasion. Sheriff Quinn Colson, back in the saddle after his latest round of job-related injuries in The Revelators (2020), gives chase along with Deputy U.S. Marshals Lillie Virgil and Charlie Hodge and the folks who really did have Gina Byrd killed, dismembered, and stashed in a bleach-filled barrel in a local dump in the first place. But it’s really TJ’s show, and she makes the most of the spotlight even before she hits the road, demanding that Gina’s much older boyfriend, Chester Pratt, return the $18,980 insurance settlement he took from Gina. Chester, deeply in debt to Dixie Mafia stalwart Johnny T. Stagg, is in no position to pay back the money; in fact, he’s getting serious pressure from Stagg’s enforcers. Things get even hotter when TJ and her crew hook up with budding social influencer Chastity Bloodgood, who offers them the hospitality of her car-dealer father’s vacation home in Hot Springs if only they’ll kill her despised stepmother. The combustible mixture of variously violent personalities leaves less room than usual for Quinn’s self-critical memories of Hamp Beckett, his late uncle and predecessor, and they seem more out of place than usual when they come.
A wild chase with walk-on roles for every lowlife from North Mississippi to New Orleans.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-32839-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
A weird, wild ride.
Celebrity scandal and a haunted lake drive the narrative in this bestselling author’s latest serving of subtly ironic suspense.
Sager’s debut, Final Girls (2017), was fun and beautifully crafted. His most recent novels—Home Before Dark (2020) and Survive the Night (2021) —have been fun and a bit rickety. His new novel fits that mold. Narrator Casey Fletcher grew up watching her mother dazzle audiences, and then she became an actor herself. While she never achieves the “America’s sweetheart” status her mother enjoyed, Casey makes a career out of bit parts in movies and on TV and meatier parts onstage. Then the death of her husband sends her into an alcoholic spiral that ends with her getting fired from a Broadway play. When paparazzi document her substance abuse, her mother exiles her to the family retreat in Vermont. Casey has a dry, droll perspective that persists until circumstances overwhelm her, and if you’re getting a Carrie Fisher vibe from Casey Fletcher, that is almost certainly not an accident. Once in Vermont, she passes the time drinking bourbon and watching the former supermodel and the tech mogul who live across the lake through a pair of binoculars. Casey befriends Katherine Royce after rescuing her when she almost drowns and soon concludes that all is not well in Katherine and Tom’s marriage. Then Katherine disappears….It would be unfair to say too much about what happens next, but creepy coincidences start piling up, and eventually, Casey has to face the possibility that maybe some of the eerie legends about Lake Greene might have some truth to them. Sager certainly delivers a lot of twists, and he ventures into what is, for him, new territory. Are there some things that don’t quite add up at the end? Maybe, but asking that question does nothing but spoil a highly entertaining read.
A weird, wild ride.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18319-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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