Perfect for a light beach read, but anyone in search of witty chick lit, hot romance or taut mystery should look elsewhere.
Five privileged young woman, all heiresses to the Saybrook diamond empire, are blessed with every luxury. But the family curse—or a vindictive villain—may end their lives prematurely.
Shepard (Everything We Ever Wanted, 2011, etc.), the architect of the best-selling Pretty Little Liars series, has created a PLL for adults. Variously related women (friends, sisters, half sisters, cousins, aunts) fret their way through man troubles, with a deadly mystery on the side. There’s Aster, the partying wild child, and her sister, Corinne, the perfectionist preparing to marry the wonderful Dixon Shackelford. Their cousins include Poppy, the president of Saybrook’s Diamonds, who's a happily married mother of two adorable children; Rowan, the brilliant in-house lawyer who pines after her lost love, Poppy’s husband; and Natasha, a yoga instructor, who curiously disinherited herself from the Saybrook fortune. Five years earlier, a beach party at the family’s glamorous summer house was the site of an executive’s mysterious drowning. An ominous website, appropriately titled “The Blessed and the Cursed,” details the family's every misstep, from wardrobe malfunctions to drunken shenanigans. No one seems to know who supplies the website with compromising photos and tips on the women’s upcoming appointments. On the eve of Corinne’s wedding, it appears the family curse is back: Poppy has fallen to her death. Was it suicide or murder? Why was the seemingly faultless Poppy arranging private meetings behind her assistant’s scheduling book? Where was her husband, James, when she fell? Could the events of five years ago offer clues? As an FBI investigation advances, rumors, secrets and ex-boyfriends abound. Unfortunately, the romances are predictable and the sex scenes, tame.
Perfect for a light beach read, but anyone in search of witty chick lit, hot romance or taut mystery should look elsewhere.Pub Date: May 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-225953-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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