A beautiful dose of carnal mayhem set in Purgatory.
This debut fantasy thriller finds an assassin taken out of the killing game only to be thrust into a surreal plot to dethrone a deity.
Former Glasgow street urchin Deborah has killed 38 people at the behest of a shadowy organization called The Orchard. Her handler, Eli, now guides her toward her latest target, a man residing within a sumptuous, unguarded mansion. She makes the assassination look like an accident, giving him a lethal injection between his toes. Moments later, someone shoots Deborah in the chest, killing her. She awakes in a Spartan room, situated in what appears to be an industrial slum full of “bedraggled beggars and throngs of sad-looking civilians.” When Deborah meets the Angels Zotiel and Zephon, they tell her she’s in Purgatory. They bring her to the Archangel Raziel, who informs her that “God is gone” and His Office has been corrupted. Deborah, an atheist, must nevertheless come to grips with her otherworldly predicament. She’s recruited by the Divine Revolution to kill the New God, who has usurped the throne and stripped the angels of power. Murdering the deity, however, means first assembling a proper support team from within the vastness of Purgatory, including a tactician (“I need someone who thinks differently than I do,” Deborah says. “Someone I can work with. Who can consider the long game, while I deal with the immediate”). James aims to scandalize in his raucous novel, boasting no shortage of horrendous flashbacks to teenage Deborah’s life in her aunt’s abusive home and then on the streets of Glasgow with her young lover Mark. Readers follow the path of someone who learns that “Hitman is a very apt word,” because the “same word we use for a kill, a junkie uses for a shot.” The narrative’s parade of shocking moments (like Deborah’s first kill, using a pen on her victim’s neck) should leave fans of garish violence and spectacular action in awe. Leaving his dramatic denouement for future installments, James spends quality time introducing the characters Deborah needs for the mission—like Lena, the nurse, and Whitman, the strategist—in segments that surround a charismatic protagonist with an equally likable cast. Near the end, a ghoulish chase sequence is the cherry on top of a richly disturbing story.
A beautiful dose of carnal mayhem set in Purgatory.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5187-8716-4
Page Count: 490
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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