Internecine noir, done just right.
A scuffling Seattle lawyer’s scheme to abscond with his firm’s safe deposit boxes has deadly consequences.
It’s 15 years ago. Half a million in debt, Robert Green uses his access as manager of the safe deposit boxes to remove them and pile them into his van, with plans of extorting clients with the unaccounted-for cash and sensitive documents in the boxes. His plan is to escape to South America with his sister, Penny, a SoCal desert-dweller whose genius IQ made her a child celebrity before she spent 14 years in prison for robbery and assaulting a cop. But his van spins off a mountain road, killing and decapitating him. His body, along with the ill-gotten loot—and his head—are discovered by Jack Biddle, the morally compromised, drug-using top cop of Granite Shores, a shabby Oregon beach town. While taking credit for cracking the safe-deposit case, he takes possession of the loot (he owes nefarious sorts a ton of money), claiming that Green disappeared with it. He thus leaves the town thinking for years that the daring thief, a hometown boy, is still alive. Flash forward to the present, when the now-legendary, media-friendly case has turned Granite Shores into a slickly gentrified destination spot—one where Penny’s nervy cousin Addie, a podcast queen, spins conspiracy theories about the local cops. “Every new dumb thing I say creates a financial ecosystem,” she says. The novel is a nice geographical shift for Goldberg—known for capturing the seedy essence of Las Vegas and the Salton Sea in Gangsterland (2014) and The Low Desert (2021), respectively—who does an uncanny job of keeping multiple plot elements in the air, shifting among unholy alliances of mobsters and do-gooders turned bad with cutting humor. Warped family histories, the trivializing effects of social media, and an occasional jab of emotion are all in the mix. “To not have hope was acutely freeing,” thinks Penny, whose words linger more than they should.
Internecine noir, done just right.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781662534089
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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