A humorous and compelling domestic tale about a man pushed to the edge.
A disgraced insurance salesman becomes the neighborhood spy in this comic novel.
When his 10-year-old nephew, Benny, is struck by a hit-and-run driver, Charlie Doyle immediately jumps into action. Unfortunately, Charlie is drunk and isn’t making the best decisions. When he gets Benny to the hospital, the boy has suffered substantial brain damage. Why didn’t Charlie just call an ambulance and let the professionals handle it? That’s what his neighbors begin to whisper about—and whether it was drunk Charlie who hit Benny in the first place. Following the accident, Charlie’s life begins to spiral out of control. He quits his job at an insurance agency, suspects that his wife may be cheating on him with his brother-in-law, and learns that his 18-year-old daughter, Velijah, was recently arrested for stealing booze from a liquor store. Then a sinkhole opens up and ruins Thanksgiving dinner. Charlie gets a job with a different insurance company—a lot of other sinkholes have opened up in the neighborhood—but his mission is actually to prevent people from collecting on their policies. When Charlie embarks on this unethical scheme with his new neighbor, blackmailer Effie Malfeezian, he also hopes to discover who exactly hit Benny. If he can figure out who did it, he may be able to clear his name and fix his family—and maybe even forgive himself. Smith’s (Scabland, 2017) prose walks the fine line between realism and slight absurdity, fashioning intriguingly odd scenarios. “What I’d like you to do, as a Secret Insurance Agent, is watch people,” explains Tammy Williams, Charlie’s handler. “Gather information. Even on people we’ve already paid out claims to on other matters. I want to know where our money is going. And where it’s not going.” The novel ends up in some unexpected (and slightly unbelievable) places, but the author constructs his world with enough logic and detail that readers will be happy to accompany him into the extraordinary. The result is a dark satire of suburban life reminiscent at times of Tom Perrota and A.M. Holmes.
A humorous and compelling domestic tale about a man pushed to the edge.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-08-659635-9
Page Count: 418
Publisher: Out Reach Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
A treat for fans of The Evil Dead or Zombieland, complete with affordable solutions for better living.
A hardy band of big-box retail employees must dig down for their personal courage when ghosts begin stalking them through home furnishings.
You have to give it up for the wave of paranormal novels that have plagued the last decade in literature; at least they’ve made writers up their games when it comes to finding new settings in which to plot their scary moments. That’s the case with this clever little horror story from longtime pop-culture journalist Hendrix (Satan Loves You, 2012, etc.). Set inside a disturbingly familiar Scandinavian furniture superstore in Cleveland called Orsk, the book starts as a Palahniuk-tinged satire about the things we own—the novel is even wrapped in the form of a retail catalog complete with product illustrations. Our main protagonist is Amy, an aimless 24-year-old retail clerk. She and an elderly co-worker, Ruth Anne, are recruited by their anal-retentive boss, Basil (a closet geek), to investigate a series of strange breakages by walking the showroom floor overnight. They quickly uncover two other co-workers, Matt and Trinity, who have stayed in the store to film a reality show called Ghost Bomb in hopes of catching a spirit on tape. It’s cute and quite funny in a Scooby Doo kind of way until they run across Carl, a homeless squatter who's just trying to catch a break. Following an impromptu séance, Carl is possessed by an evil spirit and cuts his own throat. It turns out the Orsk store was built on the remains of a brutal prison called the Cuyahoga Panopticon, and its former warden, Josiah Worth, has returned from the dead to start up operations again. It sounds like an absurd setting for a haunted-house novel, but Hendrix makes it work to the story’s advantage, turning the psychological manipulations and scripted experiences that are inherent to the retail experience into a sinister fight for survival.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59474-526-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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