Olatunde’s lively imagination and wicked sense of humor maintain suspense and keep the plotline from tiring in this...
Not every suspense tale features among its main characters a Nigerian accounting student, a lightly fictionalized version of Frank Sinatra, a Chinese secret agent and Lucifer.
The story takes place in the late 1990s when Shola, an accounting student, is forced to abandon his comfortable life in Lagos after the country’s military regime targets his family for political reasons. Working as a waiter in a pretentiously upscale New York restaurant, he has a chance meeting with a Hollywood director who impulsively casts him as a slave in the Civil War drama she is filming. At the same time, Lucifer is trying to bring about the end of humanity by manipulating China and the United States into a nuclear confrontation. The two plotlines converge when Shola is accused of several gruesome acts of murder that were actually committed by one of Lucifer’s band of fallen angels. Olatunde’s writing is marked by a rambling, discursive style that may put some readers off; it’s not uncommon for the action to be interrupted by a multipage aside about Chinese history, Nigerian university gangs or the JFK assassination. Sloppy editing impedes the flow of the narrative and several characters inexplicably change names over the course of the book. But the novel comes alive when it concentrates on Shola, whose neurotic, bemused and lightly misanthropic sensibility provides the first-person narration with humor and keen insight into Nigerian and American cultures. Early chapters set in Nigeria are particularly effective at giving a wry, deadpan look at how a fiercely intelligent, somewhat self-absorbed young man manages to exist in a world of danger, dysfunction and limited options. Shola’s arrival in New York is well-observed and Olatunde also offers solid detail on day-to-day life, from the complex interplay of a large family in mourning to the chaos of Lagos bus stops. Sections dealing with the angels, spies and the intrigues of Lucifer’s plot are broader and less grounded in reality but engaging nonetheless.
Olatunde’s lively imagination and wicked sense of humor maintain suspense and keep the plotline from tiring in this international, supernatural, semifarcical thriller.Pub Date: April 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456776060
Page Count: 568
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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