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. The story is told from the perspective of Ridley, who is proud and occasionally spooked to live on her own in the big city.Ĭleverly handled suspense for chick-lit readers.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. Ridley’s parents also come under her scrutiny, since her father served as pediatrician to Jessie as well as to other missing children. Unger effectively builds suspicions around the men in Ridley’s life: unknown, duplicitous Jake, who seems to follow her everywhere obtuse and overprotective Zack, a pediatrician like her father bitter, damaged older brother Ace, an itinerant drug user estranged from the family who drops hints of their parents’ perfidy without evidence and even Ridley’s beloved, dead Uncle Max, who overcame an abusive childhood to make his fortune in real estate and establish a humanitarian agency that shelters mothers with children frightened for their safety. He helps connect Ridley’s mysterious messages to the case of a missing girl, Jessie Stone, who disappeared in 1972 after the murder of her mother (probably by her boyfriend).

Simultaneously, an attractive, rather nosy new neighbor in her building, Jake, turns out to be a PI with all kinds of scary baggage and a bullet scar on his shoulder. Ridley’s privacy is further compromised when she receives notes from someone claiming to be her long-lost daughter. Ridley’s face is plastered over the news for days, thrilling her New Jersey parents and former fiancé Zack, whom she dumped in order to become her own person.

Ridley Jones’s 15 minutes of fame occur when she leaves her East Village apartment one morning to catch a cab and saves a toddler from being hit by a van.

A cozy, personable debut about a young New York City journalist who inadvertently begins to unravel her own identity.

Beautiful lies by lisa unger