A brilliantly woven, unsettling crime novel.
The murder of a young woman in rural Sweden has wrenching, far-reaching consequences for the policeman investigating the crime and the nephew of the man convicted of it.
Seven-year-old Isak Nyqvist has a warm relationship with his mother’s 25-year-old brother, Edvard Christensson, his regular Sunday companion. But for residents of tiny Marbäck, Edvard is a bad sort who’s cut from the same cloth as his father, “a troublemaking bastard who no one liked.” So no one except the devastated Isak is all that surprised when Edvard is arrested for killing his girlfriend, Lovisa, who died of blunt force trauma to the head before her body was left in a raging house fire. Nor are locals surprised when Isak, cursed by the same bloodlines, becomes a social misfit himself by his teens. The one person who remains unsure of Edvard’s guilt is police detective Vidar Jörgensson, who’s unable to let go of the case even after his decades-long obsession with it leads to his getting pushed off the force and his once-loving marriage runs into trouble. (Vidar’s fraught relationship with his own father, a corrupt cop, was the basis for Carlsson’s great Blaze Me a Sun, from 2023.) In the end, the smallest, most slowly emerging details provide answers to the mystery. Boasting the psychological intensity of a Hitchcock film and gloomy atmospheric elements including a ferocious storm, this is a gripping, utterly distinctive mystery by a newly established Swedish master. As in Blaze Me a Sun, Carlsson explores the nature of grief and generational trauma, all while keeping readers unsure of what’s going to happen next.
A brilliantly woven, unsettling crime novel.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780593449387
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Speculators who haven’t been put off by bitcoin’s recent crash will enjoy this walk—well, run—on the wild side.
Cotton Malone, who just can’t stay retired from international intrigue, joins the mad dance of competitors for a fortune in bitcoin.
So many people have forgotten about the horde of gold the retreating Japanese hid on Luzon Island in the Philippines that it’s not at all clear who has legal title to it. That’s perfect for Robert Citrone, the retired CIA overseer of the Black Eagle Trust, which has used the gold to fund covert operations around the world. Just as Derrick Koger, the European station chief for the CIA, is pulling Malone away from his Copenhagen bookstore to help him investigate possible misdeeds swirling around Luxembourg’s Bank of St. George and its ruthless chief operating officer, Catherine Gledhill, other interested parties turn up in often surprising connections. Freelance assassin Kyra Lhota executes Armenian oligarch Samvel Yerevan and moves on to her next target. Malone’s sometime lover Cassiopeia Vitt is snatched by high-ranking Japanese security chief Aiko Ejima. His former lover Suzy Baldwin resurfaces as Kelly Austin, BSG’s director of special technology, who’s concealing secrets from Malone and the rest of the world. They’re all on the trail of a fabulous cache of bitcoin that in the absence of any legal records of ownership will belong, like the Luzon gold, to anyone who can track it down and grab it. The grandly scaled complications that follow feature countless broken alliances and the deaths of a fearsome number of nonfranchise characters. An extended author’s note explains what’s historically accurate (quite a bit, as it turns out) and what’s fabricated (quite a bit more).
Speculators who haven’t been put off by bitcoin’s recent crash will enjoy this walk—well, run—on the wild side.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781538721032
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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