Red Hands

Starred review from October 1, 2020
A car crashes into a small-town parade and a sick man emerges, instantly killing everyone he touches. As Maeve Sinclair rushes him, he passes the deadly touch on to her, the magnitude of which she only learns by accidentally killing her mother and brother before escaping into the mountains. With this intense opening, imbued with a relentlessly increasing sense of dread, Ben Walker, weird-science expert and U.S. Government commando, is called back from the involuntary retirement he earned in The Pandora Room (2019) and tasked with capturing Maeve alive. This is a pivot in the series?Walker is on American soil, working with a different team, and fighting an ancient contagion the government resurrected on purpose?but the way the story unfolds is true to form. The neck-whipping action and shifting points of view give the reader a wide-angle perspective on the complicated, terrifying situation, invoking maximum terror on every page. Golden also leaves room for his diverse cast of characters to develop and inhabit the story fully, adding in an uncomfortable sense that this fictional tale is not too far from reality. For fans of horror-thriller series like those by Jonathan Maberry and Mira Grant.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

October 5, 2020
Golden’s third supernatural thriller featuring Dr. Ben Walker (after The Pandora Room) is almost as good as its predecessors. In the chilling opening scene, a July 4 celebration in Jericho Falls, N.H., turns hellish after a car plows into a crowd. The driver, who is riddled with bullet wounds, emerges from his crashed BMW to kill even more people, this time by touching them with his hands, which appear red and cause death on contact. Only Maeve Sinclair survives the fatal touch—but the killer’s power transfers to her. As a shadowy group in black coats arrives and takes charge of the crime scene, a horrified Maeve flees to the mountains. News of the incident disrupts Ben Walker’s plans to spend some much-needed time with his 12-year-old son, as Alena Boudreau, Walker’s new boss at of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, orders him to New Hampshire to investigate—and to find Maeve before either the police or the “blackcoats” can get to her. Golden again maintains engagement by making even secondary characters feel real and well-rounded. Series fans will be pleased by this solid installment.