Rex’s reviews of anything (but mostly books)

Every school has that one teacher; the one whose class no kid wants to take, and whose class no kid ever forgets. At the Truman School, that teacher is Mrs. Starch – suspected (by the students, of course) of having killed her own husband; rumored to have a house full of snakes; widely claimed to be a witch (or a similar epithet). When that formidable woman disappears on a biology class field trip into the Everglades, kids like Nick Waters and Marta Gonzalez feel a mixture of fear and relief… mostly relief. Most of them are pretty sure that their classmate Duane Scrod, Jr. – affectionately(?) known as “Smoke” – set the fire into which Mrs. Starch disappeared.

Problem being that the substitute filling Mrs. Starch’s sensible shoes is even worse than the real thing, so Nick and Marta go looking for their missing teacher (not without a severe case of nerves, though). Their expedition to the little house at the end of Buzzard Lane is just the start of a great adventure for the two friends. Along the way they’ll meet a couple of quiet heroes, a few greedy fools, a young man who’s finally decided to grow up, and a magnificent animal – and the two will also become heroes in their own right (and do a little growing up of their own).

And to think, it all started with a little pile of Scat.
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When we first met Thorn a couple of decades back, it was readily apparent that – like Cher, Madonna, or the artist formerly and now again known as Prince – he will always be a one-name kind of dude. So when some white-haired guy our hero’s never seen before in his life sticks out a meaty paw and says, “Daniel Oliver Thorn?” to him, it’s no secret that something is definitely amiss. Lots amiss, in fact… it seems that Thorn, the ultimate curmudgeon ever since being orphaned at the age of one day, has an actual family after all. After a fashion, that is. And his family – an uncle and a cousin he’d never known existed – has extremely interesting news for a guy who makes a hand-to-mouth existence tying bonefish flies.

That news is, apparently, extremely interesting for some other people as well; one of whom intends to see that Thorn’s most recent surprise will be his last. Seeing as he, that newfound family, and two old friends are all alone on a giant houseboat deep in the Everglades, the phrase “shooting fish in a barrel” has definite currency. The would-be assassin, however, must’ve failed to do some quite necessary research: this is Thorn we’re talking about… Read the rest of this entry »

Life can change forever in the blink of an eye. Edgar Freemantle learned that tidbit when the irresistible force that was his body collided with the immovable object that was a 100-ton crane. That meeting scrambled his brain, crushed his hip, and severed his right arm. Six months later, partially rehabbed and newly divorced, Edgar’s shrink suggested that he needed a hobby. “I used to draw a little,” he mused. Life can change forever in the blink of an eye, or it can take a little longer: Edgar Freemantle may have thought his changes were over, but he was wrong.

Edgar has departed the icy winter of Minnesota for Florida; taking up residence in an isolated beach house he’d rented sight unseen. “Big Pink,” as he calls his temporary home, has somehow become his Muse: from that very first night he began to draw and then to paint; works of a depth and power he’d never before sensed within him. It is as if something has flipped a switch inside his raddled brain: the art simply pours out of him. Some of it he could swear he’s painted with his right arm: those are the ones that frightened him…

The only other residents of Duma Key are Edgar’s landlady, eighty-something Elizabeth Eastlake, and her companion Wireman. These three disparate people are bound by more than mere geography, however; for a thing of great evil is awakening on the tiny island. Awakening for the first time in eighty years, awakening even as the only person who remembers how to defeat it slips slowly into the darkness within her mind.

If Edgar Freemantle thinks the changes in his life are done, he has another think a-comin’. Read the rest of this entry »