Even with an overcooked plot, Baker’s narrative drive keeps you pressing ahead, and his style shows just enough energy and...
Once more into the rabbit hole of conspiracies-in-high-places we go, this time through a noirish farrago of mid-20th century bad craziness.
In this rowdy pastiche of hard-boiled homage and alternative history, Baker assumes the daunting challenge of moving several sets of characters through three time frames. In one story arc, set in the summer of 1960, an LA private detective is hired by a wheelchair-bound megalomaniacal billionaire to recover his kidnapped child. In another, set in the fall of 1963, a professional hit man struggles to retain some individual honor as he gets entangled in a plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. And in present-day Dallas, an investigative journalist sifts through speculations, crackpot and otherwise, linking the kidnapping and JFK’s murder. Baker’s debut novel packs riffs and motifs borrowed from myriad American crime classics along with brutal, often graphic depictions of murder and mutilation. All of which is served with a heaping, steaming plate of paranoid scenarios involving, as one character has it, “The Mafia. Big Oil. The Intelligence Community. The Military Industrial Complex.” Along with the aforementioned characters and a motley (and familiar) assortment of sultry, secretive women and dim and/or brutal cops, the storylines are chockablock with cameos from such real-life personages as Sal Mineo, Chicago mobster Johnny Roselli, Howard Hughes, JFK in flagrante delicto, and Lee Harvey Oswald. There’s little if any verisimilitude in this blend that hasn’t been handled to deeper, richer effect by Don DeLillo and James Ellroy. And the whole raging mélange culminates in a plot twist that is just a shade beyond cute. Any one of his three storylines could have made a more satisfying novel than the one Baker slaps together here like a panini.
Even with an overcooked plot, Baker’s narrative drive keeps you pressing ahead, and his style shows just enough energy and romance to make you think he could get better with this genre thing as he goes along.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60945-287-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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
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)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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