STARTLING TOMES

SOUTH OF NOWHERE . Jeffery Deaver. Putnam's; 2025.  The fifth Colter Shaw novel by Deaver has our hero coming to Hinowah California where a levee has collapsed and the entire town is in danger. Colter's sister, Dorian, a professional who deals with disasters for a living, is on the scene as well. When Colter is attacked by a violent suspect he nicknames Bear, it becomes clear that what happened to the levee may be sabotage, and there could be more bad stuff to come. If that weren't enough, Colter has to use all of his considerable skill to rescue a family of four who were caught in the river when the levee collapsed, as well as a man's fiancee who is now lost in the woods. As the suspenseful story proceeds, it develops that some of the characters are not quite who they claim to be, and Colter must learn who's behind the scheme to flood the town along with his or her motive. An added ingredient is that Colter and Dorion learn they may have a half-sister who could rep...

BLOOD MONEY: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle . Richard Nowell. Continuum; 2011. This book reads like a college thesis, which is probably how it originated. An editor would probably have been wise to cut out the passages where Nowell writes about what he's   going   to be saying in the rest of the chapter, which we can actually read for ourselves on the next pages. His constantly spelling out and summing up -- making the same points over and over -- gets annoying. That being said, it must also be said that this is   not   a critical study of the slasher genre, at least not of individual movies, although Nowell does make some interesting points about them as a by-product. Instead the book looks more at the business end of the teen slasher cycle, how it came about from a commercial stand-point, and which films actually influenced the cycle in both the financial and creative sense. Nowell argues that the first teen slasher pic was actually the Canadian ...