An ambitious if awkward attempt at genre hopping.
A murder victim prompts a stay-at-home dad to play gumshoe in this darkly comic yarn.
Peter Greene, the narrator of Garonzik’s debut novel, is disheartened. A recent layoff from his finance job has left him with little to do but ferry his 3-year-old son, Luke, to appointments and run an endless-seeming series of errands for his wife, Lauren. At Lauren’s prompting, they’ve left city life for a coastal town whose sole virtue is the opportunity to indulge his love of surfing. On the beach he meets Robert Townsend, a former colleague, who turns up dead on the sand a week later. With few places to apply his analytical skill and feeling emasculated by his employment status, he begins following leads. What kinds of nefarious deeds was his old firm up to, what brought Robert to that wind-wracked beach, and why are so many people trying to keep him from asking questions? Garonzik strives to make Pete into the kind of sad-sack dad who’s populated novels by Sam Lipsyte, Gary Shteyngart, and Teddy Wayne, capturing the adult male put upon by daily responsibilities; a request from Lauren to pick up milk prompts a catastrophic overreaction: “Chernobyl. All is lost. Game over.” And he sees the comic absurdities of parenting a toddler, a feeling intensified by Pete’s taking Luke to grown-up locales like bars and police stations. In time, Pete learns that Robert’s fate is simpler and sadder than his earnest dot-connecting effort suggests, but by that point Garonzik has still struggled to establish a voice for the novel, which sits awkwardly between detective story and man-child bildungsroman. Pete’s complaints about Lauren are meant to comically expose a certain narcissism, but she rarely rises above a hectoring harridan. Plotlines about the finance world slow the pace, and the mood of self-deprecation tends to devolve into general sourness.
An ambitious if awkward attempt at genre hopping.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781538743362
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
A great premise leads through all the twists you’d expect to a thoroughly muddy final movement.
Sports agent Myron Bolitar meets the Setup Serial Killer, who’s found a highly effective way to keep anyone from connecting the dots.
There’s no arguing with DNA evidence, the ultimate forensic clincher. So when basketball player Greg Downing’s DNA is found on the scene where retired model Cecelia Callister and her son, Clay, were killed, the FBI comes calling on Myron to ask where they can find Greg. Myron’s a reasonable person to ask because Greg was his schoolmate and former client, the man who wooed and won Myron’s girlfriend away from him and made her Emily Downing. Try as he might, though, Myron can’t help much beyond repeating the obvious: Greg died three years ago, and his body was cremated. Since the Feds aren’t about to give up their search, Myron and his partner, financial advisor Win Lockwood, decide they’d better see if they can get ahead of this story by confirming or contradicting the story of Greg’s death. Meantime, a series of interleaved episodes show the killer eliminating a series of primary targets and framing secondary targets so convincingly for the murders, with special thanks to planted DNA, that it never occurs to the police to connect crimes that were so readily solved on their own. Complications arise when Myron’s thrown together with Jeremy Downing, the son he fathered in a pre-wedding tryst with Emily and then passed off as Greg’s, and when the allies of mob boss Joseph “Joey the Toe” Turant, who was locked up four years ago after his DNA-fueled conviction for the murder of Jordan Kravat, decide to lean on Myron to get him to reveal where Greg is.
A great premise leads through all the twists you’d expect to a thoroughly muddy final movement.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781538756317
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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