Fast-moving and quirky fiction from Madrid.
An exciting thriller set in Spain and recently translated from Spanish.
Beleaguered by crime, the European Union has created the secret Red Queen project, the name inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, designed to “adapt continually to keep up with the bad guys.” One of their tools is Antonia Scott, a non-cop who has a history of providing insights into the criminal mind. She is the smartest person in the world, and she never forgets anything. Her husband is in a coma for which she wrongly blames herself, and she contemplates suicide for a strict three minutes a day, along with a few other quirks. “My brain…isn't normal,” she says. “I can do things others find impossible.” Police pair her up with Inspector Jon Gutiérrez, an overweight gay cop whose career is in a peck of trouble for planting heroin to gain a conviction. Despite a chasm of differences, they quickly accept each other and work together to track down a criminal named Ezekiel who has slowly drained the blood from a young man's carotid artery. Then Ezekiel kidnaps Carla Ortiz, the daughter of the world's richest man. Ransom is out of the question because he just wants to teach the mogul a lesson. Antonia believes that Ezekiel kidnaps and kills for a very specific reason, probably for power. “Essentially, I’m a good person,” Ezekiel tells himself. Good enough to think of Psalm 23, anyway, as he anoints one victim’s head with oil. That doesn’t mean there won’t be blood, though. A scene with an explosion splatters grisly detail across a couple of pages, and there is a nice balance among character, action, and setting—a qanat, or underground water tunnel in Madrid, is a great place for an evildoer to set booby traps. Red Queen (Reina Roja in the original version) is the first of a completed trilogy written by Gómez-Jurado. The next two, Loba Negra (Black Wolf) and Rey Blanco (White King), must be translated into English, because thriller fans will be waiting.
Fast-moving and quirky fiction from Madrid.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781250853677
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
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
An enjoyable visit with an old character, but not one of Ware’s strongest.
Travel writer Lo Blacklock is back. Ten years after the events of The Woman in Cabin 10 (2016), she's attending the opening of a lavish Swiss hotel when, once again, a mystery intervenes.
A decade after she almost died on a luxury cruise and ended up exposing a murder plot, travel journalist Laura “Lo” Blacklock is trying to get back into the business post-Covid-19 and post–maternity leave. When she's invited to an exclusive hotel launch by the Leidmann Group on the shores of Switzerland’s gorgeous Lake Geneva, her supportive husband, Judah, insists that she should go, and her old boss, Rowan, says that if Lo can score an interview with the reclusive Marcus Leidmann, she’ll publish it in the Financial Times. Leaving Judah and the kids at home in New York, Lo is surprised by a last-minute upgrade to first class, which kicks off her trip in style. The hotel is appropriately awe-inspiring in both scenic location and effortless luxury, and Lo starts to put the memories of last trip’s trauma behind her, thinking that maybe she can just enjoy the experience this time. But then, at dinner, she's surprised to see at least three guests who were also on that original cruise, and when she finds a mysterious note in her room saying "Please come to suite 11 as soon as possible," she gets another shock. To quote William Faulkner, she realizes that “the past is never dead,” and soon Lo is careening across Europe on her way to England, only to find herself embroiled in another murder. The back half of the novel offers her the opportunity to continue her amateur sleuthing, and while she avoids much of the physical danger that plagued her on the cruise a decade ago, she is in very real legal trouble. This is the prolific Ware’s first sequel, and it's fun to spend time with Lo again, as she's both savvy and kindhearted. Unfortunately, the mystery is not as atmospheric and gripping as usual for Ware, though even a lesser Ruth Ware thriller is still worth reading.
An enjoyable visit with an old character, but not one of Ware’s strongest.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781668025628
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
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