A disappointing second outing for California child-psychologist Alex Delaware (When The Bough Breaks, 1985); this time he tracks down a little boy desperately in need of cancer treatment. Narrator-sleuth Delaware lives in semiretirement, feeding his koi and practicing self-hypnosis, but when his friend Dr. Raoul Melendez-Lynch of the Western Pediatric Medical Center calls to tell him that the parents of a little boy with cancer want to remove him from treatment, Alex agrees to help. He meets Garland and Emma Swope, the parents, their daughter Nona (a sultry, surly beauty), and the sick boy, Woody. Both he and Melandez-Lynch think the Swopes want to take Woody back to the little town of La Vista, in Southern California, to receive holistic treatment from a cult called The Touch, run by a crazy-like-a-fox ex-California lawyer calling himself Noble Matthias (the entire cult turns out to be a front for his cocaine operation). But when Woody disappears, a search of the cult's country retreat turns up nothing—instead, Garland and Emma are found murdered in a ravine, and Nona is missing. Delaware starts sleuthing in earnest and discovers that Woody is actually Nona's son—the product of an incestuous relationship between Garland and Nons. Meanwhile, Nona is having an affair with La Vista Sheriff Ray Houten, who is actually her father, having had an affair years before with Emma—although Ray is blissfully unaware of this. Delaware finally tracks Nona down to a sleazy trailer where she's living with a crazy beach boy/male prostitute named Doug Carmichael, and hiding Woody, who's burning up with fever. Carmichael nearly kills Delaware (as he'd killed the Swopes after kidnapping Woody with Nons); But Houten shows up, kills Carmichael, and is himself killed by Nons after she tauntingly tells him the terrible truth about their relationship. Nons is arrested, and Delaware brings Woody back in time to save his life. A twisted, contrived, and turgid story with red herrings the size of small whales, and a stumbling, murky finale.
Pub Date: March 1, 1986
ISBN: 0345466616
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1986
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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