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Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. Jewell’s ( I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced.
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Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past. 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.Ī tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. The Terminal Man is the ultimate option in catalytic entertainment, with a few more thoughtful doomsday riffs to remind you that it's just a little more than that.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. The audience hardly needs the positive reinforcement of the Book-of-the-Month Club. in fact he survives to escape and his increasingly violent impulses threaten everyone in sight, particularly Janet Ross, a young psychiatrist, who's not quite ready to give up on him or give him up to. The operation is successful but the patient does not quite die. Crichton won't let you forget for a minute the live, or philosophical, implications of the new science of mind control. He's the first man to undergo a stage three procedure - namely the implantation of an atomic pacemaker which will monitor his brain and transmit shock to prevent an attack although it cannot possibly cure the attendant personality disorders. Harry Benson, after an accident, becomes a psychomotor epileptic with dangerous seizures linked to his all too true vision of a clockwork orange world. More exciting (is it possible?) than The Andromeda Strain - anyway more personally angled, and with the same authenticating apparatus (is this science or fiction?), Crichton's new story is amped to another equally menacing aspect of self-destruct or what will, or what could, happen when the computer brain expropriates the biological site.