Dunn has hung his story on a gimmick (the cab thing). It doesn’t work.
New York taxicabs form the nexus of the drug trade in this messy near-future crime novel, journalist Dunn’s debut.
The city is a bleak place in 2012, ravaged by double-digit inflation and unemployment. Buildings stand empty, restaurants shuttered. Organized crime, though, has seized the opportunity. Catering to a young, well-heeled party crowd, it has created a network of “speaks,” illegal bars that float between locations, never used more than once. As for the drugs, the dealer gets his money from the clients, then directs them to a waiting cab, where the product is stashed. It works like clockwork, explains Renny, the young fashion photographer who sells Specials (Ecstasy pills) as a lucrative second job. He gets his cut from underworld boss Reza, a Bulgarian who first turned the cabs into the eponymous rivers of gold. When he’s not working, Renny the stud is having wild sex with L, who he dumps in favor of N. (He likes his gorgeous babes depersonalized.) “I really can have it all,” he gloats. Such hubris will not go unpunished; already there are warning signs (a murdered cabbie, a looming turf war) and the cops are catching on. They are represented by Detective Santiago, a hulking young Dominican-American, and his mysterious new partner Everett More. More is uncommunicative but frighteningly good at breaking bones. The opponents are now in place, but the novel stalls. Exposition trumps action. The revelation that More is a Marine entails a lecture on the Posse Comitatus Act; the search for the cabbie’s killer pauses for a survey of the taxicab business. The old maxim (write what you know) becomes in Dunn’s handling something different (write what you research). His predilections (guns, acronyms and really, really large people) poke through the narrative. A car chase (good guys pursuing good guys) and a high-tech showdown absent Reza make for an unsatisfying climax.
Dunn has hung his story on a gimmick (the cab thing). It doesn’t work.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60819-307-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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