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THE HIT

Name: THE HIT
Author: Jere Hoar
ISBN: 1-893956-34-2

by Jere Hoar ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2003

Lively, but Hoar is intentionally aiming low.

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A vet recluse turns hit man in a smartish first thriller debut from Hoar (stories: Body Parts, 1992).

“There are costs to society when it bloods its young men . . . when it teaches them it’s all right to kill certain human beings.” Luke Carr had 19 confirmed kills in Vietnam, and by the third tour he was sick of it. But life back home in Mississippi doesn’t make much sense anymore, either, so when the events of the story begin to unfold he’s kind of a high-rent Rambo: he retreats and flashes back similarly, but he can appreciate sophisticated graffiti like “Nietzsche is dead—God.” Luke is literate: “Books turn bullets,” he tells us, “insulate walls, impress women, and protect against radiation. That’s in addition to providing company, solace, information, and entertainment.” Hoar is trying to bring noir to Mississippi: “When I opened the door there she was . . .. There’s always one woman in your life that’s wrong for you, who’s going to get you into trouble.” Just as Luke is planning to relieve the local hotshot of his art collection, said woman, Kinnerly, conveniently appears, conveniently married to the hotshot, who becomes the hit. The affair between Luke and Kinnerly is a lengthy explanation of why divorce is no good and the hit must occur: money, saved children, trophy wives, etc., spliced together with sex and semiliterary puns (“ ‘A good man? They’re hard to find,’ I said”). But Luke’s on to the pending double cross—the only question being how many murders he will have to commit in the wake of murdering his lover’s husband, and might the femme fatale give new meaning to the word “fatale”? Is this tragedy more akin to Chandler or Shakespeare? Hoar’s storytelling is crisp and sometimes inventive and cute (“Dogs that smile overdo it”), but place isn’t rendered as often as it might be, and this is a far more noirish effort than a southern one.

Lively, but Hoar is intentionally aiming low.

Pub Date: March 1, 2003

ISBN: 1-893956-34-2

Page Count: 304

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003

Categories:

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)