Bursting with vigor and electrified characters and with an ending the author stamps with a knowing wink.
A small group deals with the fallout of a California ski-resort town whose residents have mysteriously vanished in Perry’s (Eliot Ness: The Rise and Fall of an American Hero, 2015, etc.) thriller.
An earthquake in Mammoth View is just the beginning. Once the explosions hit, the town’s in a full-scale panic. Billy Lane and cohorts Jackson and Sam use these as diversions to rob the local bank, but a traffic jam impedes their getaway. They turn around and head up the mountain, passing through a summer running camp for girls. Billy’s teenage daughter Tori is there, but when she returns from a hot-spring dip, her fellow runners and coaches are gone. Back in Mammoth View, notorious hellion brothers Melvin and Gordon Johnson are taking advantage of the seemingly deserted town, grabbing food or whatever abandoned goods they can find. Police chief Kenneth Hicks believes the brothers are responsible for the bank robbery, not to mention the corresponding bodies. They’ve definitely kidnapped someone, as Hicks and Lt. Johnny Lloyd soon discover, and only get more desperate and dangerous when they realize the cops are after them. Tori and radio DJ Oscar Alphonse “King” Desario may be potential abductees, for leverage or something worse. The moody story benefits from its atmospheric setting. What exactly sparked an apparent evacuation, for example, isn’t fully revealed until the end. There are hints of possible causes—someone suggests a Russian invasion or perhaps aliens—all shrouded with an undercurrent of sheer creepiness, like an initially unexplained “blob” following girls at the camp. Solidly developed characters add to the tension, people either wanting to escape their past or hopelessly locked inside it. Billy, for one, longs for the days with Becky, his partner (now dead) in both crime and love and Tori’s mom, while King’s girlfriend, Janice, is itching to flee Mammoth View—and maybe the DJ as well. Various players cross paths in intriguing, sometimes amusing ways (Janice in nearby Stockton meets someone readers will recognize), and most find their ways, reluctantly or not, back to Mammoth View.
Bursting with vigor and electrified characters and with an ending the author stamps with a knowing wink.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9972377-1-9
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Amberjack Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
