When a virulent and potent form of rabies upends life as we know it in Massachusetts, a pregnant woman and her pediatrician must fight for survival.
Tremblay reached rare new highs in the horror genre with the superbly creepy novel The Cabin at the End of the World (2018) and the Twilight Zone–esque story collection Growing Things (2019). Now, in the midst of a real-life health crisis, Tremblay delivers an eerily prophetic story about a mass outbreak of a rage-inducing virus and the havoc that ensues—basically, he's gone full-on Stephen King by way of 28 Days Later. The story opens in a small, woodsy community south of Boston where what seemed like a relatively mild rabies problem has jumped to humans, who are driven to violent rages and overtaken by a compulsion to bite as many other victims as possible to spread the disease before they eventually succumb and die within a short time. One of our protagonists is Natalie, a very pregnant woman whose husband is violently murdered by one of the outbreak victims right before her eyes. Desperate, bitten, and infected herself while also in shock, she reaches out to her pediatrician, Dr. Ramola “Rams” Sherman, to help her get a dose of the rabies vaccine before she has the baby or succumbs to the illness. Now it’s a race against time to save Natalie and the baby, all while communities are being ravaged by violence. Meanwhile, the outbreak is exacerbated by “a myopic, sluggish federal bureaucracy further hamstrung by a president unwilling and woefully unequipped to make the rational, science-based decisions necessary.” Encounters with well-meaning strangers and near-death escapes are punctuated by Natalie’s sweet recorded messages to her unborn child. A cinematic scope, scenarios grounded in the real world, and a breathless pace make this thriller one of the must-read titles of the summer.
A prescient, insidious horror novel that takes sheer terror to a whole new level.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-267916-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
Categories: PARANORMAL FICTION | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | SUPERNATURAL THRILLER | THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In the 26th of the lively Dirk Pitt Adventures, the family finds trouble on the high seas and in the high mountains.
Trouble comes looking for Dirk Pitt and his children, Dirk and Summer, in the strangest and most entertaining ways. (Mom is in Congress and misses all the fun.) Fans know that the elder Pitt is Director of NUMA, the National Underwater and Marine Agency, and that he’s not one to “sail a desk.” So they’re in the seas near the Philippines on a research project when they come across a sunken ship and the remnants of a Chinese rocket. The Chinese are upset that their secret Mach-25 rocket has failed once again. Then the area begins to get hit with unexplained tsunamis while Dirk Senior and his colleague Al Giordino explore the depths in Stingray, their submersible. The plot splits off when Dad asks son and daughter to fly to Taiwan to return a large stone antiquity they find in an aircraft that had disappeared in 1963. A Taiwanese museum official recognized it as the Nechung Idol from Tibet, so the siblings head to northern India. Dad rescues a woman from drowning and gets embroiled in a nasty conflict involving her father, a hijacked ship, and guys with guns and nefarious intentions. Meanwhile, young Dirk and Summer wind up in the Himalayas as they try to take the precious stone to the Dalai Lama. There, they try not to get themselves killed by bullets or hypothermia as they stay a step ahead of more villains who want the idol. The Pitts are all great characters—clever, gutsy, and lucky. When he and Giordino find themselves in a heck of a pickle in an area called The Devil’s Sea, Dad Pitt declares a great American truism: “Nothing’s impossible with a little duct tape.” And everything sticks together in the end—the tsunamis, the rocket, the idol. As with all the Dirk Pitt yarns, the action is fast and over-the-top, and the violence is only what’s needed to advance the story.
Dirk Cussler carries on what his father started in a series that never gets old.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-41964-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
Categories: SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE
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Murder most foul and mayhem most entertaining. Another worthy page-turner from a protean master.
14
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The ever prolific King moves from his trademark horror into the realm of the hard-boiled noir thriller.
“He’s not a normal person. He’s a hired assassin, and if he doesn’t think like who and what he is, he’ll never get clear.” So writes King of his title character, whom the Las Vegas mob has brought in to rub out another hired gun who’s been caught and is likely to talk. Billy, who goes by several names, is a complex man, a Marine veteran of the Iraq War who’s seen friends blown to pieces; he’s perhaps numbed by PTSD, but he’s goal-oriented. He’s also a reader—Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin figures as a MacGuffin—which sets his employer’s wheels spinning: If a reader, then why not have him pretend he’s a writer while he’s waiting for the perfect moment to make his hit? It wouldn’t be the first writer, real or imagined, King has pressed into service, and if Billy is no Jack Torrance, there’s a lovely, subtle hint of the Overlook Hotel and its spectral occupants at the end of the yarn. It’s no spoiler to say that whereas Billy carries out the hit with grim precision, things go squirrelly, complicated by his rescue of a young woman—Alice—after she’s been roofied and raped. Billy’s revenge on her behalf is less than sweet. As a memoir grows in his laptop, Billy becomes more confident as a writer: “He doesn’t know what anyone else might think, but Billy thinks it’s good,” King writes of one day’s output. “And good that it’s awful, because awful is sometimes the truth. He guesses he really is a writer now, because that’s a writer’s thought.” Billy’s art becomes life as Alice begins to take an increasingly important part in it, crisscrossing the country with him to carry out a final hit on an errant bad guy: “He flopped back on the sofa, kicked once, and fell on the floor. His days of raping children and murdering sons and God knew what else were over.” That story within a story has a nice twist, and Billy’s battered copy of Zola’s book plays a part, too.
Murder most foul and mayhem most entertaining. Another worthy page-turner from a protean master.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982173-61-6
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Categories: SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION
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