A flawed outing that may disappoint even Dicker’s fans.
Swiss writer Dicker's latest thriller concerns a corpse in a hotel room and a fight for the top job at a private Geneva bank.
As in his breakout novel, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (2014), Dicker has a framing story here about a writer. Only this one is named Joël, and he refers frequently to his beloved publisher, Bernard de Fallois, the name of the real author’s publisher, who shepherded Quebert and died in 2018. Whatever tribute was intended, though, it seems a dubious one given the novel’s problems. In the framing story, the writer stumbles on an unsolved murder and investigates while using the material to write his latest thriller, which is—you guessed it. As for the corpse, the crime occurred when a new bank president was about to be named. The likeliest candidate, the former bank chief’s son, may be sidelined because 15 years earlier he traded his shares to a shady financier in exchange for something outside the banking world (the potential for spoilers makes it hard to be more precise). The heart of the story concerns a love triangle as well as the love/hate between fathers, or father surrogates, and sons. But that worthy heart is smothered in layers of adipose backstory, and the tortuous plot proves nearly impossible to follow given the constant shifts among, and fuzziness of, the three main time frames. Fast readers may get the most enjoyment from all this if they can fly lightly over the clunky dialogue, flat characters, improbable behavior (“Sagamore, swallowing the last slice of pizza, stood up”), repetitions, and clichés, and so quickly motor past the first 400 pages to the point where the investigation finally picks up some speed. But that pleasure is short-lived, for the plot twists soon take over and quickly evolve from surprising to utterly implausible.
A flawed outing that may disappoint even Dicker’s fans.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-309881-7
Page Count: 592
Publisher: HarperVia
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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 superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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