In this mystery series starter, a retired cop moves into an old mansion, complete with literal and metaphorical ghosts.
Delia Sanchez is ready for a new chapter in her life. After 15 years in the Los Angeles Police Department and recent deaths in her family, she attends an open house for the Loring Mansion in LA’s Santa Clotilde neighborhood. She thinks, “This is my do-over,” but there are strings attached: The house’s buyer must be caregiver to its current feline residents, Zoeth and Esmeralda, for 10 years—and Delia hates cats. It also turns out that the house has a resident ghost. Delia isn’t a believer in the paranormal, but strange happenings start to wear down her skepticism as she tries to write her new novel. Meanwhile, her nephew Val and cousin Dora move in to renovate the place, offering a buffer against the house’s spectral presence. When Delia takes in Marisol, a young victim of domestic abuse, the odd found family bands together to get to the bottom of the haunting. Gill ably balances the book’s eerier storyline with comedy, as when a spooked Delia mistakenly attacks her nephew with a water gun or a character comments that powdered sugar on his suit might be mistaken for cocaine and make him seem “more interesting.” Delia’s relationship with her deceased brother Jimmy is carefully drawn, as is Marisol’s heartbreaking storyline. The book’s romance between Delia and Gabriel McBride, whom she meets at the local bistro, is well paced, though it proves to be one of the story’s less interesting threads. Some elements feel unearned, including an intervention from Delia’s siblings that’s resolved in less than a page. There’s also some clunky writing, as when Delia considers Marisol’s predicament: “I contemplated the younger woman knowing that the weakness to our plan of protecting her was the very love that she had for her family that kept her from going home.” This said, the mystery is well limned, and while a little predictable, the denouement is grounded and satisfying.
A slightly uneven paranormal tale with as many family laughs as fearful held breaths.Pub Date: June 16, 2022
ISBN: 979-8885905091
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUPERNATURAL THRILLER
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A more adorable plea for rationalism and gender equality would be hard to find.
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Two chemists with major chemistry, a dog with a big vocabulary, and a popular cooking show are among the elements of this unusual compound.
At the dawn of the 1960s, Elizabeth Zott finds herself in an unexpected position. She's the star of a television program called Supper at Six that has taken American housewives by storm, but it's certainly not what the crass station head envisions: “ 'Meaningful?' Phil snapped. 'What are you? Amish? As for nutritious: no. You’re killing the show before it even gets started. Look, Walter, it’s easy. Tight dresses, suggestive movements...then there’s the cocktail she mixes at the end of every show.' ” Elizabeth is a chemist, recently forced to leave the lab where she was doing important research due to an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Now she's reduced to explaining things like when to put the steak in the pan. "Be sure and wait until the butter foams. Foam indicates that the butter’s water content has boiled away. This is critical. Because now the steak can cook in lipids rather than absorb H2O.” If ever a woman was capable of running her own life, it's Elizabeth. But because it's the 1950s, then the '60s, men have their sweaty paws all over both her successes and failures. On the plus side, there's Calvin Evans, world-famous chemist, love of her life, and father of her child; also Walter Pine, her friend who works in television; and a journalist who at least tries to do the right thing. At the other pole is a writhing pile of sexists, liars, rapists, dopes, and arrogant assholes. This is the kind of book that has a long-buried secret at a corrupt orphanage with a mysterious benefactor as well as an extremely intelligent dog named Six-Thirty, recently retired from the military. ("Not only could he never seem to sniff out the bomb in time, but he also had to endure the praise heaped upon the smug German shepherds who always did.") Garmus' energetic debut also features an invigorating subplot about rowing.
A more adorable plea for rationalism and gender equality would be hard to find.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54734-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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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