In bestselling author Christopher Golden’s supernatural thriller Red Hands, sometimes a story is a warning. Sometimes the warning comes too late When a mysterious and devastating bioweapon causes its victims to develop Red Hands, the touch of death, weird science expert Ben Walker is called to investigate. A car plows through the crowd at a July 4th parade. The driver climbs out, sick and … parade. The driver climbs out, sick and stumbling, reaching out…and everyone he touches drops dead within seconds. Maeve Sinclair watches in horror as people she loves begin to die and she knows she must take action. But in the aftermath of this terror, it’s Maeve who possesses that killing touch. Fleeing into the mountains, struggling with her own grief and confusion, Maeve faces the dawning realization that she will never be able to touch another human being again.
“Weird s**t expert” Ben Walker is surprised to get a call from Alena Boudreau, director of the newly restructured Global Science Research Coalition. There’s an upheaval in the organization and she needs to send someone she can trust to Jericho Falls. Whoever finds Maeve Sinclair first will unravel the mystery of her death touch, and many are willing to kill her for that secret.
Walker’s assignment is to get her off the mountain alive. But as Maeve searches for a hiding place, hunted and growing sicker by the moment, she begins to hear an insidious voice in her head, and the yearning, the need… the hunger to touch another human being continues to grow. When Walker and Maeve meet at last, they will unravel a stunning legacy of death and betrayal, and a malignant secret as old as history.
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When a contamination descends on the community of Jericho Falls, an infiltration of mysterious coalitions appear not only to quarantine the town but to capture the cause of a potential epidemic. Maive Sinclair finds herself and her family the center of an investigation of unusual proportions known as Project: Red Hands.
Christopher Golden focuses his creative intellect towards a living infection that drives the mind to madness, instills a merciless desire within and a refuses to accept consequences to horrifying actions. The novels fine line whereby reality and fiction straddle is only a filtration mask and a hazmat suite away from the real world. For these reasons Red Hands adorns an all too familiar global face of bio-engineered bacteria, leaving the population and its victims desperate for answers and explanations. Having the backdrop to the story take place on a scenic terrain mountainside truly brings forth the savagery of escape and survival for the consumed and infected. With the race to obtain “the claim” and unlock ancient mysteries, Christopher Golden creates a haunting hunting ground where voices can be heard yearning for life, and lusting for death.
The structure of cliffhanger chapters, subtle momentum of storyline development and relentless unguarded suspenseful shocks make this book a five star home run that you won’t be able to put down. The underlying messages significantly correlating to the mortality of love, comfort and simple joys is an enjoyable theme and life lesson. Red Hands is published by St. Martin’s Press and is available in all formats.
4.5
Book source ~ NetGalley
A Fourth of July parade in Jericho Falls is interrupted by something horrifying and the Sinclair family is in the middle of it. People are dying and weird shit expert Ben Walker is called in to contain the situation. But this…thing is already out of hand and it’s only going to get worse. Ben really has his work cut out for him this time.
This story starts out with a bang and doesn’t let up until the end. It’s the stuff of nightmares with horror, science, bioterrorism, suspense and thriller all rolled up into an awful scenario. After the Pandora incident in the last book, Ben has been sidelined by his higher ups and he’s been left out of all things DARPA for nine months. But then as he’s going camping with his son he gets a call, but not from his old boss. From his new one. Or is she? Ben’s not sure, but there’s shit happening in the US and he needs to get there and get it under control. He needs to intercept Maeve Sinclair before anyone else does and bring her in where they can contain her before anyone else dies. Quite a tall order even for Ben, but he tackles it as best he can. When he runs into Maeve he feels like he may already be too late to save her. However, there is more than a biochemical reaction going on with her. Something else is there, inside her, and it’s getting stronger. What. The. Hell?!
Having read Ararat and The Pandora Room, I had an inkling of what Ben would be up against – weird shit that is extremely dangerous. The story is super-fast paced and the characters are well-fleshed out. The tension is palpable, the suspense is the edge-of-your-seat, fingernail-biting kind, and the horror, well, it’s nightmare inducing. Eeeeeee! Seriously, this story is all kinds of fucked up. I highly recommend it!
Red Hands by Christopher Golden is a book I requested from NetGalley and the review is voluntary. This book grabs you up in the first couple of pages and continues to hold you suspended until the last page! It’s part supernatural, part science fiction, and all thrills and suspense! Unpredictable and creepy! It starts with a 4th of July parade but the author gives you the sense of foreboding. Then, IT happens! A stranger that can kill with a touch! That is only the start! Action packed and ready to rumble! Very intriguing and exciting book!
Scientist and DARPA adventurer Dr. Ben Walker returns for his third go-round in Red Hands, a tightly wound horror thriller that just might be my favorite of this series so far.
A car, driven by a man carrying a supremely lethal infection, plows into a July 4th parade before the insane driver starts attacking those at the festivities by hand. His touch is instantly lethal, save for one, a young woman named Maeve, who he infects in his final moments. Panicked, and afraid of coming into contact with anyone else after all that she has just witnessed, Maeve flees for the isolating safety of the woods. After cell phone videos of the attack goes viral, Walker is tasked with recovering Maeve and keeping her safe, with the caveat, of course, that he won’t be the only one looking for her.
Christopher Golden has crafted a timely and supremely compelling read with Red Hands! Reading this in the midst of a pandemic helps, perhaps, if only to remind one that while COVID-19 is, of course, bad, it could also be a hell of a lot worse. The contagion at the heart of this book is absolutely vicious, and Golden describes its fast-acting effects in nicely gory detail as the infected are gruesomely killed off in only a matter of minutes. Being touched by a carrier of the Red Hands virus is a guaranteed death sentence, a conceit that keeps the tension high even as the story builds up a bullet train’s momentum.
While the killer virus angle is well handled, Golden doesn’t rest on his laurels, story-wise. As dangerous as it is, the Red Hands virus would make one hell of a bio-weapon, which means Walker has his work cut out for him in the race to find Maeve. There’s a bevy of Blackcoat operators and foreign intelligence agents gunning for her, and by extension Walker, too, making our central series protagonist a man against the world, almost literally.
And, hey, speaking of the world — our past two encounters have seen Walker off in some far-flung locales, like Turkey and the Iraqi desert, so it’s a welcome change of pace to see him operating on home turf. The forests and mountains of New Hampshire present a vibrant terrain, one that’s dissimilar enough to draw comparisons to the previous two books, but given all the action happening in those woods one best not get too comfortable with that home team advantage.
Red Hands excels as a bio-terror thriller, but it’s most definitely a horror novel through and through. Beyond the extreme lethality of this unusual bug, Golden injects plenty of additional weirdness to the proceedings, along with a few very welcome “HOLY SHIT!” moments, some that welcomingly recall his comic book pedigree, but which also remind you of just how well-earned that Bram Stoker Award win was for Ararat. The climax is an outstanding, high-octane action romp that also puts the emotional and physical horrors of it all front and center, along with some terrifically gooey, pulpy grossness that kept me glued to my Kindle.
Golden injects enough freshness into this third outing, along with expected chills and thrills, to prove there’s still plenty of life left in this series. It feels like a safe bet to say we haven’t seen the last of Ben Walker, but unless Book 4 comes out tomorrow I don’t think his next adventure can come fast enough.