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. You don’t even have to supply your own rain.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. All too soon, Harry, breathing resistance from every pore, leads the police back to the spot where they find the Reebok’s late owner, and a deeper blackness settles in over the landscape, as debut novelist Booth lets both the suspects and the suspecters stew in their juices for round after round of drinking, questioning, abortive romance, conscientious cutting away from emotional high-points (an effect that produces more irritation than suspense), and sordid but unsurprising revelations-including the identity of the killer, which readers unclouded by Ben’s depression will dope out long before he does.
And Diane Fry, the new recruit from Birmingham teamed with Ben on the case, has secrets of her own too ugly to bear remembering. Ben Cooper, the local CID classmate of Helen’s, is torn by anxiety over his schizophrenic mother and the chances of his promotion to sergeant. Lee Sherratt, the Vernons’ studly gardener, has gone missing after getting the sack from Laura’s apoplectic father.
Laura’s parents, Graham and Charlotte Vernon, have been locked for years in a loveless marriage whose main amusements seem to be recriminations and affairs of the flesh.
Harry himself, a retired miner, is such a louring old man that only his granddaughter, Helen Milner, can get through to him, and that not any too reliably. An eternal cloud seems to have been hanging over the Peak District village of Edendale even before Harry Dickinson reports finding the Reebok trainer of 15-year-old Laura Vernon.
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