Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice-for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. 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 suspense builds rapidly from there as Iris pulls back Will's layers of deception and solves the mystery of what the circumstances of his death meant for their marriage.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. High school classmates present a very different-and chilling-picture of Will. Iris proves herself a relentless investigator in a case that takes her to Will's hometown to solve the mystery of whom she married. Will doesn't seem to be hiding a secret lover, but nothing Iris believed about her husband turns out to be true. According to Corban, Will was on his way to a job interview in Seattle, but the office he was interviewing with has never heard of him. At a memorial service for the crash victims, she meets Corban, who introduces himself as a friend of Will's from the gym. Looking through his files to try to figure out what he was up to, Iris finds a new will and $2.5 million in life insurance policies Will had taken out only months earlier. Scheduled to be en route to Florida to make a presentation at a cybersecurity conference, his name is found on the passenger manifest of a plane bound for Seattle after it crashes in a field.

All this changes when Will dies on a plane flight he wasn't supposed to be on. Friends and family admire their beautiful home, great jobs, and passionate commitment to each other. But all is not as it seems.įrom the outside, it looks like they have a perfect marriage.

On the day after Iris and Will's seventh wedding anniversary, they're ready to start trying for a baby.

The marriage lie novel