Royce’s murder mystery, involving generational vengeance in the time of Covid-19, would make the ancient Greeks proud.
In 1948, 12-year-old Noelle Huber was brutally murdered in Pittsburgh. The case was never solved; her older brother, Matthew, was a perennial suspect but was never charged. Shift now to Linda Alonso in Palm Beach, Florida. It’s 2020; she and her Argentina-born husband, Miguel, have two young kids and a shaky marriage. Enter “the writer,” whose identity we won’t learn until later. The chapters toggle between “The Wife” (Linda) and “A Writer’s Thoughts.” The writer, we learn—because as the narrator, she tells us so—is a moderately successful mystery writer also living in Palm Beach, a loner and a stalker and more than a little scary. And let us not forget Miguel’s older brother, Diego, who shows up on the Alonsos’ doorstep after many years when he was presumed dead. Royce is a wicked good writer (“Diego had carved out pieces of each of the children’s hearts and inserted himself inside”). Her portrait of Linda Alonso is good, but her portrait of the writer is even more impressively creepy. Shall we call her Nemesis? A very clever gimmick is that the writer is certainly meant to be a stand-in for Royce, the author behind it all. This is meta with a vengeance, a story about telling a story, and fascinating for students of that stuff. Another clever trick is that characters that we have a bias to trust, like Linda, may not be so trustworthy. If this is dirty pool, the reader will have to decide. And there are some serendipitous developments, as the writer is the first to admit. But overall, the gears of this clever plot mesh like those of a Swiss watch. There is some time shifting, but the chronology works out in the end.
A truly absorbing mystery by a writer at the top of her game.Pub Date: tomorrow
ISBN: 978-1637584965
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
75
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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. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK TO SCREEN
A tale that’s at once familiar and full of odd and unexpected twists—vintage King, in other words.
10
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Narnia on the Penobscot: a grand, and naturally strange, entertainment from the ever prolific King.
What’s a person to do when sheltering from Covid? In King’s case, write something to entertain himself while reflecting on what was going on in the world outside—ravaged cities, contentious politics, uncertainty. King’s yarn begins in a world that’s recognizably ours, and with a familiar trope: A young woman, out to buy fried chicken, is mashed by a runaway plumber’s van, sending her husband into an alcoholic tailspin and her son into a preadolescent funk, driven “bugfuck” by a father who “was always trying to apologize.” The son makes good by rescuing an elderly neighbor who’s fallen off a ladder, though he protests that the man’s equally elderly German shepherd, Radar, was the true hero. Whatever the case, Mr. Bowditch has an improbable trove of gold in his Bates Motel of a home, and its origin seems to lie in a shed behind the house, one that Mr. Bowditch warns the boy away from: “ ‘Don’t go in there,’ he said. ‘You may in time, but for now don’t even think of it.’ ” It’s not Pennywise who awaits in the underworld behind the shed door, but there’s plenty that’s weird and unexpected, including a woman, Dora, whose “skin was slate gray and her face was cruelly deformed,” and a whole bunch of people—well, sort of people, anyway—who’d like nothing better than to bring their special brand of evil up to our world’s surface. King’s young protagonist, Charlie Reade, is resourceful beyond his years, but it helps that the old dog gains some of its youthful vigor in the depths below. King delivers a more or less traditional fable that includes a knowing nod: “I think I know what you want,” Charlie tells the reader, "and now you have it”—namely, a happy ending but with a suitably sardonic wink.
A tale that’s at once familiar and full of odd and unexpected twists—vintage King, in other words.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-66800-217-9
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
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