Rankin’s (Saints of the Shadow Bible, 2014, etc.) canny cop is as gray and dour as his Edinburgh beat, but he’s in fine form...
Rebus fans, rejoice: here are one novella, two new stories, and 28 reprinted tales about veteran detective John Rebus.
This cross section of Rebus’ career includes a month-by-month account of his detective work, starting with “Playback,” a case that everyone but our hero considers open-and-shut. It’s followed by a tale of a homeless man providing Rebus with a valuable clue in “Being Frank”; a vision of Jesus that helps solve a murder in “Seeing Things”; an assist from Shakespeare in "A Good Hanging”; and the cycle’s final entry, in which an ex-con finds his own kind of peace at the year’s end in “Auld Lang Syne.” Christmas brings its offbeat crimes, too. "No Sanity Claus” shows how useful a holiday outfit can be for a small-time crook. In “St. Nicked,” a Yuletide heist takes an unexpected turn. And Rebus finds himself in a showdown at the Festival of Santas in “Penalty Claus.” In other previously published stories, the detective’s keen ear cracks a case in "Talk Show,” and his skill with crossword puzzles comes to the fore in “Trip Trap.” Rebus, generally a notorious rule flouter, is unusually conscientious in "Facing the Music.” The novella, Death Is Not the End, reunites Rebus with a childhood friend and an old flame. In "The Very Last Drop,” the recently retired Rebus takes on a ghost in a brewery. The first of the two new stories, "The Passenger,” concerns a woman who bought a one-way ticket on a solitary holiday, and the second shows the perennially hard-drinking Rebus running true to form when he’s up against “A Three-Pint Problem.”
Rankin’s (Saints of the Shadow Bible, 2014, etc.) canny cop is as gray and dour as his Edinburgh beat, but he’s in fine form in these clever, occasionally touching, and often wryly funny vignettes.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-29683-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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