Violence and love go hand in hand in this tale of two rough men seeking vengeance for their murdered sons.
A lean, mean crime story about two bereaved fathers getting their hands bloody.
Coming from the right author, genre fiction has a rare capacity to touch on any number of big ideas: love, death, hatred, violence, freedom, bondage, and redemption, to name just a few. Cosby's latest fits the bill. Fast on its feet, by turns lethal and tender, the story takes place in small-town Virginia, though it could be the backwoods of a great many places. Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee Jenkins, both ex-cons haunted by their pasts, wouldn’t ordinarily mix, largely because Ike is Black and Buddy Lee is White and a casual racist. But the two men are tragically linked. Their sons were married to each other, and they were murdered together, shot in their faces outside a fancy Richmond wine store on their anniversary. The dads are both homophobes, but they also love their sons, so when the police investigation quickly stalls, Ike and Buddy Lee decide to crack a few skulls on their own. Cosby gives us both the charge of once-bad men getting back in touch with their wild sides and the sad reluctance of relatively straight-and-narrow lives turning to vengeance. These old-timers have done bad, bad things, and they’ve done the time to prove it. Now they’re ready to do those things again in the name of a thorny father-son love that neither man is quite comfortable with. Here’s Buddy Lee after a long, hard night with his new friend: “Chopping up your first body is disgusting. Your second is tiresome. When you’re doing your fifteenth it’s all muscle memory.” This is a bloody good yarn with two compelling antiheroes you’ll root for from the start, and not only because their enemies, or at least some of them, belong to a White nationalist biker club with murderous ways of its own. Lean and mean, this is crime fiction with a chip on its shoulder.
Violence and love go hand in hand in this tale of two rough men seeking vengeance for their murdered sons.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-25270-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
An enjoyable visit with an old character, but not one of Ware’s strongest.
Travel writer Lo Blacklock is back. Ten years after the events of The Woman in Cabin 10 (2016), she's attending the opening of a lavish Swiss hotel when, once again, a mystery intervenes.
A decade after she almost died on a luxury cruise and ended up exposing a murder plot, travel journalist Laura “Lo” Blacklock is trying to get back into the business post-Covid-19 and post–maternity leave. When she's invited to an exclusive hotel launch by the Leidmann Group on the shores of Switzerland’s gorgeous Lake Geneva, her supportive husband, Judah, insists that she should go, and her old boss, Rowan, says that if Lo can score an interview with the reclusive Marcus Leidmann, she’ll publish it in the Financial Times. Leaving Judah and the kids at home in New York, Lo is surprised by a last-minute upgrade to first class, which kicks off her trip in style. The hotel is appropriately awe-inspiring in both scenic location and effortless luxury, and Lo starts to put the memories of last trip’s trauma behind her, thinking that maybe she can just enjoy the experience this time. But then, at dinner, she's surprised to see at least three guests who were also on that original cruise, and when she finds a mysterious note in her room saying "Please come to suite 11 as soon as possible," she gets another shock. To quote William Faulkner, she realizes that “the past is never dead,” and soon Lo is careening across Europe on her way to England, only to find herself embroiled in another murder. The back half of the novel offers her the opportunity to continue her amateur sleuthing, and while she avoids much of the physical danger that plagued her on the cruise a decade ago, she is in very real legal trouble. This is the prolific Ware’s first sequel, and it's fun to spend time with Lo again, as she's both savvy and kindhearted. Unfortunately, the mystery is not as atmospheric and gripping as usual for Ware, though even a lesser Ruth Ware thriller is still worth reading.
An enjoyable visit with an old character, but not one of Ware’s strongest.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781668025628
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
© 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.
