The novel is not always coherent, but Gwyn’s taut prose commands readers’ attention.
Gwyn (stories: Dog on the Cross, 2004) pens a grim, suspenseful first novel about murder in a small town.
Thomas is only 15, yet he yearns for death. Both his parents are dead. His father, a Chickasaw, died in prison; his mother was Mexican. Thomas lives with his Spanish-speaking grandmother Nana, whom he loves fiercely, and his aunt. He has just one friend, Charles, a black kid from the ghetto. We are back in the dying town of Perser, Okla., the setting of Gwyn’s stories. Thomas’s feelings of isolation intensify at a Powwow where he learns of Shampe, a Native American boogeyman who lives underground but emerges to steal children; so says Enoch, a tribal elder, a folklorist and the wealthy owner of a drilling company. Thomas goes from being a straight-A student to a dropout working at the golf course, all because of Enoch’s words: “Go under.” Why would he give such advice? It’s a major disappointment that Gwyn allows Thomas and Enoch to fade without an explanation, before shifting attention to two white men, Sheriff Martin and Hickson. Martin is a decent guy who feels responsible for the death of his kid brother in a childhood accident and so takes Thomas’s subsequent disappearance personally. Hickson is a decorated veteran from the first Gulf War whose wife left him when he experienced PTSS. Later he got it together enough to become golf-course groundskeeper and Thomas’s boss. His own obsession with the underground begins when a perfectly round hole appears in his yard. Gwyn cobbles together some suspense around Thomas, Hickson and his neighbor Parks. There will be two murders and a climactic confrontation underground, naturally, but the strain connecting the lost teenager to the equally lost adults is evident; the concept of a magnetic force pulling them all down feels spurious.
The novel is not always coherent, but Gwyn’s taut prose commands readers’ attention.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06723-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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