Way funnier than most mysteries, and more thrilling than most comic novels.
This audacious, genre-bending debut novel fuses an academic comedy of manners with an existential murder mystery.
Translated from the French, the novel by former schoolteacher Dufossé suggests that the terrors and traumas of the early teen years transcend national boundaries. The plot begins with the apparent suicide of Eric Capadis, who apparently couldn’t resist the impulse to jump from the window of his middle-school classroom. His replacement is Pierre Hoffman, who also serves as the novel’s narrator, and who was the closest thing that Capadis had on the faculty to a friend. The parallels between the 25-year-old Pierre and his unfortunate predecessor are striking and unnerving: Both are lonely and seemingly sexless bachelors (though Pierre has an incestuous infatuation with his sister) and both do their best to resist the dysfunctional dynamics of the faculty, which can be as threatening as any of the challenges presented by a classroom full of 13-year-old students. Early on, Pierre is warned by one of those students that he should get out while he can, a suggestion that something more than suicide led to the death of Capadis. As other misfortunes bedevil these students, it appears that this particular group might be the classroom of the damned. Though the mystery sustains the narrative momentum, a deliciously black humor laced with philosophical speculation (and occasional punk-rock references) spices the prose. Pierre proves to be the most cluelessly untrustworthy of narrators, leading readers to wonder whether the students are as much of a threat to Pierre as Pierre might be to the students (or to himself). And whatever the craziness, hormonal and otherwise, inherent within the early teens, the students could hardly be more collectively maladjusted than the faculty entrusted with teaching them. The result is a tightrope performance between tragedy and farce.
Way funnier than most mysteries, and more thrilling than most comic novels.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-14-303811-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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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