A disturbing, propulsive, and satisfying thriller. Wilson is an author to watch.
A troubled ghostwriter’s past may be the key to an explosive secret.
Life hasn’t been the same for Jake Buchannan since the accident that seriously injured his 8-year-old daughter, Em, and drove a wedge between him and his wife, Abby. Jake just hopes that his new job writing the memoirs of a mysterious and wealthy Colorado man will at least ensure they can pay for Em’s medical bills. When he meets former teacher Clara Stowe on his flight to Denver, he’s instantly drawn to her. Small talk turns to something more profound when Clara reveals that she plans to kill herself at the site of two mountain peaks, Aspen’s Maroon Bells. And that’s not all. Clara was adopted as a child, as was Jake, and neither can remember their childhoods before they were adopted. It’s enough to convince Jake that they’ve met for a reason, and he implores Clara to contact him if she needs him. Through alternating narratives, it’s revealed that Clara and Jake were both invited by a mysterious man named Landis to take part in a clinical trial designed to help them unlock memories and meet their full potential. Both were given an evocative, illustrated book and a vial of pills and have gone through various changes in the months since, such as heightened empathy for Jake and Clara’s self-imposed isolation and fascination with death. When Jake is approached by a woman claiming that Landis isn’t quite what he seems, he finds himself in a relentless quest for the truth that just might kill him. Wilson (Mr. Tender’s Girl, 2018, etc.) explores how good intentions and hubris can lead down dark paths while tackling themes of sorrow, guilt, and the intoxicating power of memory and human connection with equal aplomb. He even throws in a murder mystery for good measure and delivers a denouement that is both strangely sad and exceedingly creepy. Dean Koontz fans in particular will find a lot to enjoy.
A disturbing, propulsive, and satisfying thriller. Wilson is an author to watch.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4926-8603-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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