Over-the-top evil turns this otherwise excellent first novel into an exercise in extremes, but even at its worst, Griffin’s...
Griffin’s debut novel propels readers into the chilling worlds of big-money drugs, small-town corruption, and a murderer who strikes without conscience.
Vicious killer Harlan Lee’s out of prison, but his plans don’t include leading a redemptive life: all Lee has on his mind is revenge against the people who put him there. First to suffer is William Petite, the district attorney who put him away. Afterward, Lee heads for Newberg, Wisconsin, to finish what he started by systematically going through the rest of the players involved in his case, including both a former sheriff, Lipinski, and Norgaard, Newberg’s retired police chief. But Norgaard’s institutionalized and almost not worth bothering with until Lee discovers the elderly man’s family: Ben Sawyer, a disgraced Oakland officer now with the Newberg police; Alex, Ben’s wife and Norgaard’s daughter; and their son, Jake. Ben, a good cop with a career-changing mistake behind him, hated returning to Newberg, where he and Alex grew up, and longs for his old life. Now Lee, as well as Ben’s current chief of police, Jorgenson, and his thoroughly evil narcotics head, McKenzie, have it in for him, and there’s no limit to how far they’ll go. Griffin instinctively creates a compelling atmosphere, but the bad guys in this novel—who seemingly include every law enforcement officer in the state of Wisconsin—are so plentiful and consummately evil that readers won’t ever look the same way at the patrol cars they pass. And that’s the novel’s biggest issue: Griffin has created characters so vile and depraved that the book reads like a Hannibal Lector convention. As a plus, Griffin is a cop in real life, which adds authenticity and the patina of the real deal to his work.
Over-the-top evil turns this otherwise excellent first novel into an exercise in extremes, but even at its worst, Griffin’s work proves superior to the unrealistic fare that often passes for a police thriller.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3850-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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