The Eight-Day Clock

Name: The Eight-Day Clock
Author: Dale Swanson
ISBN: 978-1-5239-5316-5

by Dale Swanson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 26, 2016

This Florida-set noir makes a few missteps but offers a twisty plot and a hard-boiled, erotically adventurous detective.

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A gay private investigator is hired to probe a blackmail threat against a conservative Mormon politician in this comic detective novel.

In the fall of 1996, Tampa, Florida-area congressman Dick Whitlock is up for re-election. As a Mormon Republican running on a family values platform, he can’t afford scandal, so when he’s threatened with blackmail—via compromising photographs of his son, Tony—he hires 30-year-old private eye Jimmy Campaglia. The out and proud Jimmy heads up the agency of Campaglia and Chilton with his bong-hitting boyfriend, Bailey. Jimmy narrates this sexy, convoluted thriller in an appropriately hard-boiled style; for example, when he’s asked to meet with the handsome, seductive Tony in his bedroom, he reflects, “Something tells me he thinks he has the upper hand. Something tells me he knows what I like.” Indeed, before leaving the Whitlock mansion, he enjoys a shower with Tony; later, they and Bailey have an erotic encounter at a gay sex club. On the blackmailer’s trail, Jimmy follows leads to a house where he discovers Adrian, the Whitlocks’ second son, drugged and posed nude in the company of a dead photographer whose film is missing. Then things get even more complicated: a Whitlock chauffeur dies suspiciously, a 911 call goes astray, books on terrorism surface, another extortion attempt is made, and conspirators turn on each other. In his debut novel, Swanson has a good handle on his intricate plot, keeping readers well-oriented as its many developments occur. He also uses his colorful, corrupt Florida setting well: the oversized Whitlock mansion, for example, is described as “a photo-spread sample of what happens when new money loves Gone With the Wind.” Jimmy can be amusingly snide, but the novel’s obsession with physical beauty is unpleasant and makes its characters predictable; unattractiveness and obesity signals evil as surely as black hats do in a Western. Similarly, Jimmy’s gender-normative judgments—he’s brutal about masculine women and effeminate men—could match any conservative politician’s. Still, the protagonist is smart and tough, and Swanson humanizes him with a weakness for irresponsible men and ownership of an 18-pound Himalayan cat.

This Florida-set noir makes a few missteps but offers a twisty plot and a hard-boiled, erotically adventurous detective.

Pub Date: March 26, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5239-5316-5

Page Count: 310

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BONE CODE
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
TWO NIGHTS
by Kathy Reichs

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THE WINNER

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997

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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)