Warn the fans: this isn't a new Alex Cross psychokiller foray (Pop Goes the Weasel, 1999, etc.), but instead a rewritten and retitled version of Virgin, Patterson's apocalyptic 1980 horror novel. At the French shrine of Lourdes in 1917, three children delivered a prophecy from the Virgin Mary: At some point in the future, two girls will experience near-simultaneous immaculate conceptions; one will give birth to a new Savior; the other will bring the Antichrist into the world. Now, in an undated present, with strange new plagues and catastrophes filling the news every day, and the Pope dying of a horrible virus, private detective Anne Fitzgerald is abruptly hired by Boston's Cardinal Rooney to keep an eye on young Kathleen Beavier, a spoiled, trash-talking (but virginal) rich kid. Kathleen's attempt to get an abortion is stymied when she finds her doctor’s bleeding corpse hanging from a hook in a South Boston clinic. Since then she's been hearing nasty voices and believes she's being watched by animals. An ex-cop with a Harvard psychology degree, Fitzgerald is also a former nun who left the order after falling in love with a priest. Though that love affair was never consummated, fate will reunite Fitzgerald with good-looking Father Justin O'Carroll. Meanwhile, in an Irish village, poor but pure Colleen Deirdre Galaher is getting dirty looks from the nuns at her Catholic boarding school. Sent from Rome to investigate, Father Nicholas Rosetti, the Vatican's international expert on miracles, finds himself aroused by the sight of the girl. Could this have anything to do with the inexplicable fainting spells he suffered in Rome only days ago? And what about that nasty voice that reviles him in his dreams? One can only hope that the ridiculous, cliff-hanging finale’s promise of a sequel will never be fulfilled. Post-Exorcist horror clichés, updated with a handful of contemporary references.
Pub Date: May 22, 2000
ISBN: 0-316-69061-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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