Red-hot storytelling.
Two master storytellers create one explosive thriller.
Mauna Loa is going to blow within days—“the biggest damn eruption in a century”—and John “Mac” MacGregor of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory leads a team trying to fend off catastrophe. Can they vent the volcano? Divert the flow of blistering hot lava? The city of Hilo is but a few miles down the hill from the world’s largest active volcano and will likely be in the path of a 15-foot-high wall of molten menace racing toward them at 50 miles an hour. “You live here, you always worry about the big one,” Mac says, and this could be it. There’s much more, though. The U.S. Army swoops in, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff personally “drafts” Mac into the Army. Then Mac learns the frightening secret of the Army’s special interest in Mauna Loa, and suddenly the stakes fly far, far beyond Hilo. Perhaps they can save the world, but the odds don’t look good. Readers will sympathize with Mac, who teaches surfing to troubled teens and for whom “taking chances is part of his damned genetic code.” But no one takes chances like the aerial cowboy Jake Rogers and the photographer who hires him to fly over the smoldering, burbling, rock-spitting hellhole. Some of the action scenes will make readers’ eyes pop as the tension continues to build. As with any good thriller, there’s a body count, but not all thrillers have blackened corpses surfing lava flows. The story is the brainchild of the late Crichton, who did a great deal of research but died in 2008 before he could finish the novel. His widow handed the project to James Patterson, who weaves Crichton’s work into a seamless summer read.
Red-hot storytelling.Pub Date: June 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780316565073
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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