A fervent hero headlines this engrossing end-of-days zombie tale.
A young woman braves a post-apocalyptic world teeming with undead hordes and hostile survivors in this horror sequel.
Following the events of An End (2022), Vallerie Sabell is a 19-year-old survivor in a zombie-littered United States. She has luckily run across some affable sorts, namely Grahm and his small group, who allow her to join their peaceful commune up in the mountains. Grahm calls the settlement “quaint”: “Tiny houses, all wood and brick; like the olden days.” Vallerie is an enemy of the Bastion, a militant band who have taken it upon themselves to police this “New America.” The book follows Bastion leader Esther Mathews as he searches for Vallerie in order to mete out the group’s typical punishment—execution. Grahm is determined to keep her safe, though the commune can’t avoid the Bastion, which willingly trades food for such goods as clothing. But when Esther realizes that Vallerie is closer than he previously believed, he’ll do whatever he can to capture her, even if it entails threatening children. Vallerie, who over time has become skilled in weapons and fisticuffs, may decide to fight the Bastion and settle their differences once and for all. Pawlicki’s second installment, like the preceding book, is a quietly enthralling tale. For example, the story centers on the living characters, from Grahm finding another band of survivors to a Bastion soldier questioning Esther’s obsession with Vallerie. Zombies, meanwhile, fade into the background, though a few people use them to their deadly advantage. There’s nevertheless undeniable evolution, with Vallerie becoming more than capable of taking down foes, undead or otherwise. Readers see various sides of her; she’s a doting dog parent to Bullet, but she won’t hesitate to kill to protect herself and her friends. Her intermittent bursts of violence produce the novel’s most indelible scenes, including the final pages, which offer some resolution—though a third volume seems likely.
A fervent hero headlines this engrossing end-of-days zombie tale.Pub Date: April 23, 2022
ISBN: 9798986050614
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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