Summary
Summary
"Original and imaginative . . . Ripping suspense, sheer terror, and a wrenching love story." --Sandra Brown, New York Times bestselling author of Friction
The terrible truth about Manderley is that someone is always watching.
Manderley Resort is a gleaming, new twenty-story hotel on the California coast. It's about to open its doors, and the world--at least those with the means to afford it--will be welcomed into a palace of opulence and unparalleled security. But someone is determined that Manderley will never open. The staff has no idea that their every move is being watched, and over the next twelve hours they will be killed off, one by one.
Writing in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King, and with a deep bow to Daphne du Maurier, author Gina Wohlsdorf pairs narrative ingenuity and razor-wire prose with quick twists, sharp turns, and gasp-inducing terror. Security is grand guignol storytelling at its very best.
A shocking thriller, a brilliant narrative puzzle, and a multifaceted love story unlike any other, Security marks the debut of a fearless and gifted writer.
"Be surprised, be very surprised: Gina Wohlsdorf brings more than just plot twists and a terrifically tender love story to this thriller . . . It's her playful homage to Hitchcock and du Maurier that had me reading, howling, and just plain loving this novel." --Sara Gruen, author of At the Water's Edge
" Grand Hotel meets Psycho in the age of surveillance . . . Security is cinematically vivid, crisply written, and sharp enough to cut . . . Wohlsdorf brilliantly subverts our expectations of the action genre in this smart, shocking, poignant thriller." --Emily Croy Barker, author of The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic
"The thrill of this novel goes beyond its wickedly clever, split-screen, high-tech wizardry--a kind of video gamer's literary retake of Hitchcock's Rear Window--and emanates from its strange, disembodied narrator . . . The effect is terrifying, sexy, dizzying, and impossible to look away from." --Tim Johnston, author of Descent
"Shocking and filled with Tarantino-ish dark humor. . . Structurally reminiscent of the amazing Jennifer Egan,Wohlsdorf's book is certainly a hybrid, like nothing else. Get ready." --Ann Beattie, author of The State We're In
"Flawless . . . Security is perfectly tuned for blockbuster status . . . They don't make a hotel big enough to house all the people who will want to read this, and soon, as in Manderley, all eyes will be on Wohlsdorf." --Daniel Kraus, Booklist, starred review
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
At the start of Wohlsdorf's stellar debut, property manager Tessa is sweating the small stuff at the new Manderley Resort, fretting over which place settings to deploy at the upcoming opening gala. She's unaware that certain uninvited guests are about to turn the opulent Santa Barbara, Calif., Shangri-La-which has been flogging its state-of-the-art security-into an abattoir. Meanwhile, Tessa's foster brother and former heartthrob, motocross legend Brian Domini, reappears after 11 years of estrangement. As the Ducati-swift plot accelerates from there, told through a mosaic of views from various Manderley security cameras (as seen by an initially unidentified narrator), it's a testament to Wohlsdorf's skill that she successfully negotiates the numerous tonal shifts between the unfolding Grand Guignol splatterfest and Tessa and Brian's rekindling passion. Readers will gradually discover an even more emotionally affecting story as the action races to the moving climax. Agent: Emma Sweeney, Emma Sweeney Agency. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In 1973, MGM released a curious film called Wicked, Wicked. Shot entirely in what the movie posters touted as Duo-Vision (better known as split-screen), it followed, in simultaneous halves, a string of brutal murders at a swanky California hotel. Loud, jazzy, and splashed with blood, it was an American take on the giallo slasher films popularized by Italian directors like Dario Argento and Mario Bava. But unlike cult classics like Suspiria or Kill, Baby . . . Kill!, Wicked, Wicked quickly faded away. Still, one has to wonder if debut author Wohlsdorf, staying up too late as a child, managed to catch it, and it made an impact. If so, her trauma is our gain: Security, her debut, is a flawless literary refresh of giallo devices, completed with a masked-and-gloved killer; long, sharp knives; screaming; lingerie-clad victims; and twists aplenty oh, get ready for the twists. The setting is another California hotel: Manderley Resort. (Du Maurier is only the first genre nod: the killer wears the same mask seen in John Carpenter's Halloween, and critical action takes place in Room 1408, a number made notorious by Stephen King.) Tessa is a chief-of-staff of sorts, leading a skeleton crew through final preparations for Manderley's big opening as the choice getaway of the rich and famous out for both opulence and unparalleled privacy. The point-of-view is third-person omniscient, or so it seems for 11 pages, at which point Tessa looks into a security camera at us; at least that's what it feels like and speaks. It's the first shock of many: we do have a narrator, it turns out, and he's sitting at a bank of security cams that, unbeknownst to staff, probe into every single room of the hotel. Discovering who this affectless security officer is and why he doesn't do anything as the body count increases is one of the supreme pleasures of the book. Wohlsdorf draws out revelations with treacherous patience, altering our perception of events each time we think we know the score. Here comes the gimmick, but as in Wicked, Wicked, it's a good one. When concurrent action happens, Wohlsdorf splits the page into two, three, or four columns (some necessitating holding the book sideways), each one representing a camera. The stunt is never overused, instead providing a periodic strangling of tension before the next jump, and slash, and gush. Just like that, Wohlsdorf's peculiar prose choices make sense, from the stumpy declarative sentences (the security officer is only doing his job, reporting what he sees) to the jarring lack of line breaks between intercut locations (the officer is flicking his eyes back and forth, too quick for the book to bother with traditional spacing). These are, of course, stylistic choices, though the novel has, in a way, an anti-style it's a poker-faced account of some unpleasant goings-on. This would fall flat without strong characters and plotting, and Wohlsdorf brings both. Tessa is a self-made success, a cement wall laced with cracks that don't show until the 11-years-late return of her former foster-brother and, weirdly, longtime crush Brian, who might be ready to give up his dangerous life on the motocross circuit if they can both admit their illicit feelings. The rest of the cast? They are just colorful enough that we wince when the killer steps out of his blood-drenched secret elevator, universal key-card in hand, and slips into their rooms. It's spoiling nothing to say that most of these side characters, however delightful, are going to end up as meat piled in bathtubs. That is, after all, the game we're playing, and Wohlsdorf, though a rookie, knows how to play. Unlike the aforementioned obscure horror flick, Security is perfectly tuned for blockbuster status: scary, gory, kinky, and experimental enough to push readers' envelopes without going so far as to lose mainstream appeal. They don't make a hotel big enough to house all the people who will want to read this, and soon, as in Manderley, all eyes will be on Wohlsdorf.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
DAPHNE DU MAURIER'S 1938 novel "Rebecca" opens memorably: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." As it turns out, Manderley, Maxim de Winter's grand Cornish estate, is more nightmare than dream, the scene of psychological torment, lies and murder, its holiday appeal ranking somewhere between Ann Radcliffe's castle of Udolpho and Stephen King's Overlook Hotel. In Gina Wohlsdorf's debut novel, "Security," the self-made real estate developer Charles Destin Jr. names his new resort after de Winter's notorious pile. (It's suggested that Destin Sr.'s recorded readings of "Rebecca" were an influence.) With Manderley's "Party of the Year" weeks away, what could possibly go wrong? The story's heroine, Tessa, superintends the party's finishing touches. (Among other gimmicks, Destin has undertaken to pour champagne into an elaborate 1,000-glass pyramid, comparing the display to "the miracle of Jesus and his disciples feeding the 5,000 with five loaves and two fish.") Wohlsdorf conjures Tessa from action-movie central casting: "Tessa never cries"; "Tessa is a difficult woman to love. She likes sex, but she also likes boxing"; "Tessa's a difficult person to get to know"; "Tessa is an ambulant contradiction. She is at once strikingly strong and heartrendingly vulnerable." Piecemeal, we're provided with details of her clouded past. A wildly gesticulating French chef ("The dishwasher. She is broken!' He shakes a fist in the air"), as well as various cleaners and caterers, fill out the staff. A Rhodes scholar-cum-former member of the Navy SEALs oversees security. (Readers expecting something along the lines of Steven Seagal's knife-wielding ex-SEAL/cook from "Under Siege" will be disappointed.) WE ARE SOON told by the mysteriously omniscient narrator that two capital-K killers are on the loose, each wearing the mask from the "Halloween" movies. (Lest there be any confusion: "It's the same mask from the ?Halloween' movies, the ones with Jamie Lee Curtis.") One of the marauders, called "the Thinker" (he "often rests his masked head on his fist. When he does this, he resembles Rodin's famous sculpture The Thinker'"), keeps watch as his taller, brawnier accomplice, "the Killer," proceeds from room to room, murdering coolly and meticulously: "The Killer ... draws the blade across his throat slowly enough to relish the act, but quickly enough that he can ... speedwalk to the kitchen, discard the knife in the sink, wash up ... and situate himself in the dining chair, napkin in lap, steam still rising from the cuisine, the first forkful of which - he chooses a bite of cordon bleu and half a broccoli floret." In other words, Patrick Bateman meets Michael Myers. Though the killers' motives are unclear, their violent spree is rendered vividly through the hotel's pervasive network of cameras. To simulate the effect, Wohlsdorf narrates various scenes in split screen, with the page divided into columns following each camera's vantage. While I appreciate the novelty, the layout feels more school textbook than thriller. The scheme is not helped by the narrator's musings on security and safety: "The best security is invisible security" (repeated twice more, later, for emphasis); "The most thorough safety is safety one's object of protection doesn't know about"; "Security means never having to say you're sorry." (O.K., I made up the last one.) Wohlsdorf is fond of paradoxes: "Tessa looks bottomlessly sad, because she looks almost happy"; "If nothing matters, then everything does"; "It was senseless. It made perfect sense." And then there are her at-times puzzling analogies: "He keeps talking, like his words are rocks and speech is their momentum down a hillside"; "It's as if they see El Dorado in the banality of the other"; "Tessa and Brian are like scared gods in a bleached sea." The plot moves along - bodies pile up, Tessa reckons with her past and comes face to mask with the killers - but the victims generally lack flesh. For all the blood, "Security" is strangely bloodless. MAXWELL CARTER writes frequently on popular culture for the Book Review and other publications.
Kirkus Review
A camera's-eye view shows more than we may be prepared to see in this innovative thriller. Debut novelist Wohlsdorf uses a clever low-tech techniquesplitting pages into two or three columns of textto show simultaneous action as it's recorded by cameras in different sections of the Manderley Resort. The new hotel promises to raise the bar where security is concerned, but staff members are being murdered at an alarming rate and threatening to ruin the grand opening (and the marble floors) with their trailing organs. Manager Tessa is oblivious to this, her sole concern being that things run smoothly, until a body practically lands on her. It's uncertain at first whether the killings are being carried out to send her a message and who (or what) is narrating the story; that's the book's big reveal, and it's worth the wait. If the bodies stacking up like cordwood distract a bit from personal revelations about Tessa and a figure from her past, no matterthe real thrills here are the clues as to what's going on, which are doled out with precision, as well as the dark humor in some of the killers' methods. Almost nobody in this story runs the risk of dreaming again of Manderley; the vast majority take the big sleep before the curtain falls, in increasingly gory ways that nevertheless play out with farcical timing. The resolution stretches credibility, but by then the adrenaline is pumping so hard it hardly matters. A fight to the death next to a tower of champagne flutes is a central scene here, and it perfectly shows how intensity and frivolity continually skirt one another under the eyes of watching cameras. This horror story with a humorous edge casts video surveillance as both hero and villain and raises plentiful goose bumps as a result. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Tessa, manager of the ultraluxurious, ultrasecure Manderley Hotel, has a massive checklist to finish in preparation for the grand opening. Unbeknownst to her, a small crew of killers entering the hotel is picking off the staff-and the murders are being observed by a mysterious unnamed narrator through the hotel's extensive security system. VERDICT With an innovative presentation and numerous references to pop culture staples, this action-packed thriller should appeal to fans of the Die Hard film series. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.