Book Review | Red Hands

One seemingly ordinary 4th of July, a driver crawls out of his car and proceeds to attack everyone around him … and everyone he touches, mysteriously dies within instants. However, in a desperate attempt to save her loved ones, Maeve Sinclair tries to stop him—only to become a carrier of the same touch of death. Realizing that she herself is now a walking bioweapon, she flees to mountains. Now government agencies, research teams, and her sister are in a race against the clock to find her.

Christopher Golden's Red Hands is an eerily-timed thriller about physical contact bringing about death. I guess you can say the story brings a whole new meaning to the term "touch-starved," and since I've been touch-starved for months now without being able to hug my family or friends during the pandemic, I can relate. I found myself empathizing with Maeve’s loneliness and I found it both heartbreaking and interesting to get her POV as a host of the sickness.

However, the more the “Red Hands” sickness is explained, the less satisfactory the explanation becomes. (This is the same issue that I had with Wilder Girls.) The plot twist is dropped halfway through with little-to-no-foreshadowing, making it feel unearned and anti-climactic. It felt out of the blue to me. I wish the big reveal had occurred later on in the story with more build up in order to leave a bigger impact.

Ultimately, Red Hands succeeds more as a heart-pounding and emotional survival thriller than it does as a well-thought-out contagion story.

Thank you, NetGalley and St. Martin's Press, for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Book Details:

Publication Date : December 8, 2020

Publisher : St. Martins Press

ISBN : 9781250246301
Pages : 320

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