Frenetic and clever: does for lonesome security guards what John Welter’s Night of the Avenging Blowfish (1994) did for the...
A high-strung sentry meets his match in this witty comedy about love, possession and the uncertainty of security.
Barring the overly elaborate but forgivable confluence of double-crosses at its gasping finale, Davies’s latest comic novel (Goodbye Lemon, 2006, etc.) succeeds admirably. Our loquacious narrator is Otto Starks, a highly specialized security agent known as a “pulse”—a human sentinel with otherworldly powers of perception honed by years of training and a plethora of pharmacological abuse incurred in the interests of toxin immunity. “To say that we are elite security guards doesn’t quite cover it,” Otto explains. “We are the reason why the Crown Jewels still belong to Great Britain and why warheads haven’t shown up in Iran.” Blessed with the love of struggling art-history professor Charlie Izzo, who thinks he’s a talent scout for the Mets, Starks is circling around a few more high-paying gigs before he plans to slip away with Charlie in tow on an expensive sloop. Putting a monkey wrench in his plans is a preternaturally gifted art thief dubbed the “Rat Burglar,” who revels not only in outmaneuvering the hypersensitive guard, but in leaving him alive each time to suffer the ridicule of his equally quirky comrades. Davies brilliantly imagines the elaborate details of guarding treasures that Otto thinks of merely as “MacGuffins,” from the bantering shorthand of his fraternity of muscle-bound custodians to the action-packed brawls between Starks and opponents armed with dart guns. As the plot intensifies toward a showdown among Otto, his elusive nemesis and a vicious underworld puppeteer named Azar over a stolen cache of misappropriated Iraqi art, Davies’s latest starts to resemble a comic book more than a crime novel. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Frenetic and clever: does for lonesome security guards what John Welter’s Night of the Avenging Blowfish (1994) did for the U.S. Secret Service.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59448-314-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As she seeks to repair bridges, Cat awakens anger and treachery in the hearts of those she once betrayed. Making amends,...
Before sobriety, Catherine "Cat" Coombs had it all: fun friends, an exciting job, and a love affair with alcohol. Until she blacked out one more time and woke up in a stranger’s bed.
By that time, “having it all” had already devolved into hiding the extent of her drinking from everyone she cared about, including herself. Luckily for Cat, the stranger turned out to be Jason Halliwell, a rather delicious television director marking three years, eight months, and 69 days of sobriety. Inspired by Jason—or rather, inspired by the prospect of a romantic relationship with this handsome hunk—Cat joins him at AA meetings and embarks on her own journey toward clarity. But sobriety won’t work until Cat commits to it for herself. Their relationship is tumultuous, as Cat falls off the wagon time and again. Along the way, Cat discovers that the cold man she grew up endlessly failing to please was not her real father, and with his death, her mother’s secret escapes. So she heads for Nantucket, where she meets her drunken dad and two half sisters—one boisterously welcoming and the other sulkily suspicious—and where she commits an unforgivable blunder. Years later, despairing of her persistent relapses, Jason has left Cat, taking their daughter with him. Finally, painfully, Cat gets clean. Green (Saving Grace, 2014, etc.) handles grim issues with a sure hand, balancing light romance with tense family drama. She unflinchingly documents Cat’s humiliations under the influence and then traces her commitment to sobriety. Simultaneously masking the motivations of those surrounding our heroine, Green sets up a surprising karmic lesson.
As she seeks to repair bridges, Cat awakens anger and treachery in the hearts of those she once betrayed. Making amends, like addiction, may endanger her future.Pub Date: June 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04734-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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