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THE HUNTING PARTY
Plot, reasonably clever. Setting, nicely done. Characters, two-dimensional stereotypes, but you can't have everything.
Ever since college, these nine friends have remained close. This year, only eight of them will go home from their New Years' party.
While Miranda and Katie are childhood friends and bonded with Julien, Mark, Samira, Giles, Nick, and Bo while they were at Oxford or soon after, Emma didn't become part of the group until she married Mark just a few years ago. For that reason, she has gone all out to plan this year's New Year’s gathering at a remote Scottish hunting lodge. "Very exclusive," she reports. "They only let four parties stay there each year." She's had the place stocked with truffles, foie gras, and other delicacies, and Miranda and Julien have brought a case of Dom Pérignon. As we turn the first page of Foley's (The Invitation, 2016, etc.) debut thriller after several historical novels, it is Jan. 2, 2019. Heather, the manager of Loch Corrin, receives a breathless visit from Doug, the rough-hewn and scary/sexy gamekeeper. He has found the body of the missing guest. We won't know which guest that is, of course, for quite some time. The tense tale of this ill-fated reunion is told in flashbacks from several different characters' perspectives, each with a different angle and a different dark secret in his or her past, as is classic in this form of the whodunit. It seems likely that the killer comes from the ranks of the guests—there's a good bit of interpersonal tension, much of it generated by the extreme gorgeousness of Miranda, the queen bee of the crowd. Her relationship with her husband, Julien, is surely not the bed of roses the others believe, and her so-called best friend, Katie, seems to hate her guts. On the other hand, there's mention of a serial killer on the loose in the Highlands, so who's that sneaking around in the woods?
Plot, reasonably clever. Setting, nicely done. Characters, two-dimensional stereotypes, but you can't have everything.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-286890-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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DEVOLUTION
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
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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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