A measured, commendable start to an undead saga with definite potential.
In Pawlicki’s horror series launch, siblings traverse America in the wake of a devastating zombie apocalypse.
Vallerie Sabell and her brother, Allan, are the only two survivors of a school shooting. Having lost her boyfriend in the massacre, Vallerie is plagued by nightmares. But after somehow ending up in a coma, she awakens to something even more terrifying: Zombies have run amok across the United States; Allan and Vallerie’s friend, Trisha Belrave, have managed to keep themselves and their comatose loved one alive. Vallerie quickly adjusts to this new way of life (no phones, no internet) and hones her skills with weapons to take out the undead. She joins Allan and Trisha in scavenging for food and supplies as the trio searches for a secure shelter that they can call home, at least for a time. Walking corpses aren’t the only threat in this apocalypse—there are militant groups as well, including one that sets its malicious sights on a member of Vallerie’s tiny group. The narrative runs down the zombie-genre checklist, from the looting of seemingly abandoned properties to fellow human survivors proving just as dangerous as the undead. The story skips past the first several months of the zombie outbreak, and neither Vallerie nor the readers get much backstory, though intermittent flashbacks offer some illumination. The author’s simple but smartly concise prose describes scenes of foraging that are fraught with tension (“A TV with a cracked screen was left on the floor next to a wooden stand, appearing to have been dropped mid-theft. She entered inside, cautious in her step”), as zombies can shuffle up without warning. In the same vein, every newly introduced human feels untrustworthy and may very well harbor a sinister agenda. The final act gives the story a much-welcome shot of adrenaline with a frenzied and wholly engaging rescue attempt.
A measured, commendable start to an undead saga with definite potential.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798986050607
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.
The loss of her police officer father and the discovery of an abandoned car in a local lake raise chilling questions regarding a young woman’s family history.
When Hazel Sharp returns to her hometown of Mirror Lake, North Carolina, for her father’s memorial, she and the other townspeople are confronted by a challenging double whammy: As they’re grieving the loss of beloved longtime police officer Detective Perry Holt, a disturbing sight appears in the lake, whose waterline is receding because of an ongoing drought—an old, unidentifiable car, which has likely been lurking there for years. Hazel temporarily leaves her Charlotte-based building-renovation business in the capable hands of her partners and reconnects with her brothers, Caden and Gage; her Uncle Roy; her old fling and neighbor, Nico; and her schoolfriend, Jamie, now a mother and married to Caden. Tiny, relentless suspicions rise to the metaphorical surface along with that waterlogged vehicle: There have been a slew of minor break-ins; two people go missing; and then, a second abandoned car is discovered. The novel digs deeper into Hazel’s family history—her father was a widow when he married Hazel’s mother, who later left the family, absconding with money and jewels—and Miranda, a consummate professional when it comes to exposing the small community tensions that naturally arise when people live in close proximity for generations, exposes revelation after twisty revelation: “Everything mattered disproportionately in a small town. Your success, but also your failure. Everyone knows might as well have been our town motto.”
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781668010440
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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