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Book Review: Live Wire by Kyle Toucher

Cover art for Live Wire by Kyle Toucher

 

Live Wire by Kyle Toucher

Crystal Lake Publishing, 2023

ISBN-13: 9781957133324

Available: Paperback, ebook

Buy:  Bookshop.org | Amazon.com 

 

While Live Wire is the book title, it’s also an apt description of the writing: it crackles and snaps with electricity.  For a horror/thriller, this is a good one to start the summer with.  It’s also one of the nuttier ideas to come down the pike.  Transmission line towers that uproot themselves from the desert and start stomping around, wreaking havoc?  That’s one plot that certainly hasn’t been done before!

 

The book runs two threads concurrently.  In the first, former wannabe rock star Pale Brody, his young son, and a long-distance trucker named Ken Lightfeather are hunkered down at a ‘”last chance” desert gas station, riding out the worst electrical storm ever seen.  Also with them is the aging station owner, Otis Thompson.  The towers pull loose at the height of the storm, and the four of them are faced with a situation that is certainly not covered in the US Army’s Field Survival Manual.

 

The other thread covers the shadowy science and engineering firm whose experiments enabled the electrical pylons to go walkabout.  Nikki and Randy are two scientists who leave the firm in the middle of an experiment gone wrong, when it unleashes bloody carnage on the whole group.  The scientists eventually cross paths with the store group, and they band together to survive the towers from hell.  And hell (or something like it) just may be where the towers get their powers from, for they have abilities beyond just walking around and destroying things.  

 

Live Wire is an extremely engrossing book that will have readers zipping through pages, mainly due to the author’s excellent writing and sense of pace.  It’s that classic “tight but loose” style of writing: it drives the narrative and gets the story across, but doesn’t take itself too seriously.  There are a lot of hilarious asides and analogies, both from the characters and the narrator, giving the story an easy, flowing feeling that makes the pages move quickly.  The humor really shows up in the interrogation transcripts that are spaced throughout the book, as Nikki proves hilarious with her sarcastic way of belittling the investigators questioning her.  This book, at heart, is unquestionably a thrill ride, but the humor and wit of the characters help give the story a big boost.   Some readers might be a little bothered by the lack of fully detailed explanation for why things happen, but there’s enough there to keep most readers happy.  Some is left to the imagination, and the story is better off for it.

 

Bottom line: for a thriller with a bit of a horror bent to it, this one covers all the bases.  Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

 

Posted on May 22, 2023 by , Reply

Book Review: The Den by Cara Reinard

The Den by Cara Reinard

Thomas and Mercer, Dec. 2022

ISBN: 9781542039765

Availability: paperback, Kindle

 

Cara Reinard’s The Den recycles a tried and true plotline used countless times, and keeps it entertaining enough to ignore that there really aren’t any original twists to the plotline.  You know exactly what you’re getting ahead of time, but it’s fun enough that you don’t care about the lack of originality.

 

In this case, the plot is the trope”‘rich dad with estranged children is about to die and leave inheritance to offspring, all of whom have reason to want him dead.” If you’ve seen the movie Knives Out, then you know the majority of the book plot.  In The Den, the only stab at something new is that if any of the four siblings die before the old man, their share of the inheritance is split among the other siblings.  The rest is standard fare in the book: all the kids have financial problems, and they are all screw-ups in one way or another.  

 

Any of “inheritance plotline” books just need to follow some simple rules to be worth reading.  One, everyone needs to be a suspect and have motive.  Two, the killer or killers’ identities are well hidden until the end of the book.  Three, the author can’t get carried away with their own cleverness and make the mystery too convoluted.  Finally, the book needs to be entertaining.  With The Den, the author succeeds on all four counts.  There are other suspects besides the siblings: the housekeepers, servants and their families all have reason for murder, so there’s a big enough cast of characters to keep the reader guessing.  The identity of the villain(s) is well-concealed until the very end: the majority of readers probably won’t guess correctly, and that’s what is supposed to happen in a book like this.  The plot is twisting enough and clues are scattered throughout, but it doesn’t get too difficult to follow.  Readers will get to the end and feel it made sense. Most importantly, the book is entertaining.  The pacing is quick enough with no wasted time or pointless plot offshoots, and it’s enough to keep the pages flipping.  With a book like this, that’s all you’re looking for.

 

Bottom line: this is predictable fun.  Readers who enjoy mysteries are likely to enjoy this one.

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson.

Posted on April 6, 2023 by , Reply