Highly readable and entertaining, though far-fetched in key moments, the novel benefits especially from Massey's mostly...
A man working for a Dublin funeral home runs afoul of one of Ireland’s top gangsters in this dark, comic, and sometimes-romantic debut.
The Paddy of the title, age 42, is having an awful half-week, starting with sleeping problems caused by memories of his pregnant wife’s sudden death, and loss of the child, two years ago. He manages, though, to brush aside his grief and professional ethics when his dealings with a newly widowed 60-year-old woman develop rather quickly into sex and she experiences both the small and large deaths. Covering his involvement in this fresh piece of business—the autopsy’s a big threat, “with my DNA lining Lucy’s birth canal”—warms him up for several days of fatality, snafu, and deception. The peak, or nadir, is a car accident in which he kills one of the country’s most violent criminals, sneaks off, and then has to discuss the funeral arrangements with his even nastier brother. Paddy also manages to get involved with the willing widow’s equally willing daughter when it comes time to discuss details for what is now a double funeral (maybe the movie will be called Funeral Crashers). That grief might galvanize the libido is at least more plausible than the mystical tricks Paddy’s father taught him about leaving his body or hypnotizing vicious dogs—in this case a cross of fox, wolf, and Alsatian. An undertaker himself, Massey throws in interesting and quite believable sidebars on embalming, corpse-dressing, and cremation. Personal experience probably lies behind one of the funeral home’s funnier mess-ups and the need to convince a bunch of angry Irish mourners that a closed casket is the best way to go.
Highly readable and entertaining, though far-fetched in key moments, the novel benefits especially from Massey's mostly restrained, deadpan Irish sense of humor.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59463-344-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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