A sexy, energetic page-turner just one heavy edit away from mass-market appeal.
In Lando’s debut novel, a former porn star tries to escape her sordid past, but she can’t seem to shake the violence and political intrigue that follow in her wake.
The trauma of an abortion drives a jilted teenager toward the porn industry in Los Angeles, where she falls under the purview of a powerful, violent operator who dabbles in human trafficking. Meanwhile, a charismatic congressman is on his way to becoming the nation’s second black, first independent-party president, with the help of his beautiful, cutthroat advisor. Eventually, the storylines intersect. Throughout the novel, parallels are made between the porn industry and politics: both are industries in which things are accomplished through manipulation. There’s plenty of action, with satisfying amounts of sex, violence and suspense. Most of the characters are colorful and well developed, even the minor ones like a Mexican gangster or a righteous, busybody next-door neighbor in a small Midwestern town. The craving for love or acceptance that underpins all the characters’ actions makes them engaging and sympathetic. However, the book is prevented from truly taking off by its fatal tendency to indulge in excessive exposition. In church, main character Cristal Caprice (trying to live a new life as Bianca Nubreze), thinks to herself: “Do I have on too much makeup? Is my dress too revealing?” Then, the narration sticks in a clunky passage of telling, not showing: “It was a huge step for Bianca to show up in church, so everything, including how she dressed, turned into an internal struggle.” Later, an angry, lovelorn secondary character named Solae attacks and holds Cristal at gunpoint. Exasperatingly, the narration feels compelled to slow down what would be a high-drama scene by unnecessarily summarizing everything that just happened: “It was the hardest thing Solae had ever done—to attack Cristal and hold her at gunpoint.” If the author were to trim away the redundant, overly long explanations that bloat many paragraphs, then this tight, fast-paced thriller could hold its own against anything sold in mainstream bookstores.
A sexy, energetic page-turner just one heavy edit away from mass-market appeal.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-1462024872
Page Count: 400
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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