Every time the reader thinks this story’s turning right, it takes a hard left. But it never wanders in circles, and it does...
A tense, broiling, 21st-century Western with a crafty premise and a gruesomely high body count.
Imagine HBO's Westworld, only without androids and taking place far closer to our own era, and you basically have the setting of this bleak-yet-antic prairie-noir novel by Sternbergh (Near Enemy, 2015, etc.). Somewhere in the most isolated reaches of the Texas Panhandle is the tiny, hardscrabble town of Caesura (“rhymes with tempura”), the population of which consists entirely of transplanted criminals who have not only been given new identities, but have had the memories of whatever they did to be relocated totally erased. It’s part of an experimental program in behavior modification, and the community’s got some pretty peculiar rules, one being that the residents’ new names are compounds of movie stars and U.S. vice presidents. Examples include Spiro Mitchum, Greta Fillmore, Buster Ford, and Hubert Gable, the last of whom is the second resident within a week to have been found shot dead. Gable was killed in an apparent bar fight while the first death was an apparent suicide. Because these are the first such deaths in the town’s eight-year history, it’s become a priority puzzler for sheriff Calvin Cooper (yep, another alias) and his deputies, one of whom, a bright young woman named Dawes, thinks she knows where to look for a connection. Meanwhile, the parched stillness of what many of its residents call the Blinds is soon shattered by more than just errant gunfire; black vans carrying people with suits, dark glasses, and firearms appear, and the new arrivals start asking questions of their own that may have something to do with Calvin’s good friend Fran Adams and her young son, Isaac. Two things are clear: nobody in this story is who they’re supposed to be, and their secrets carry a high cost.
Every time the reader thinks this story’s turning right, it takes a hard left. But it never wanders in circles, and it does move like a championship stock car toward a climax that, however shattering, implies there’s more to come.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-266134-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
Readers who love to be tricked by an unreliable narrator may forgive the shortcomings of this fast read.
A dual narrative pits a New Age beauty with a checkered past against an old-fashioned gal fighting for her kids and her man.
Piper Reynard has moved to Westport after the mysterious deaths of her husband and stepdaughter on the West Coast, and actually he was dead husband No. 2. Now she has changed her name, erased her internet footprint, and opened Harmony Healing Arts on the premises of a failed recovery center: “Maybe things were really going to be different here. They had to be. She couldn’t keep starting over and finding new places to hide.” In short order, Piper fixes her gaze on a handsome married lawyer named Leo Drakos. Leo has “always been a loyal and faithful husband,” so his wife, Joanna, is taken by surprise when he responds to Piper’s charms and almost immediately kicks her out of the house and cuts her off from their children. Neither her therapist nor her awful mother seems very sympathetic as Joanna’s whole life goes up in smoke. As Piper ruthlessly maneuvers her way into the family, having hot sex with Leo on her sailboat and forcing the children to drink green smoothies, Joanna turns private investigator in order to find out who this creepy platitude-spouter really is. A woman who hates children was a strong element of the author's first book, the very successful The Last Mrs. Parrish (2017); a somewhat watered-down version is in play here. In general, Constantine’s (actually two sisters writing in collaboration) third suspense novel relies on many of the same strategies as the first two, and they feel a bit mechanical at this point. The prose, too, is flat and the characters, thin.
Readers who love to be tricked by an unreliable narrator may forgive the shortcomings of this fast read.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296728-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Agreeably credible lovers and a neat piece of home-restoration compensate some for the hokey hauntings on the bayou. Loyal...
A gumbo seasoned with ghosts, love, and murder on the bayou.
When 30-something Declan Fitzgerald of Boston, a successful lawyer and a member of a large and loving family, breaks off his engagement to very suitable Jessica, he knows he needs to change his life. Lawyering is not fun anymore, so, recalling Manet Hall, an old deserted plantation house he once visited with law school classmate and New Orleans native Remy, he buys the property and moves down south. Declan is also a gifted craftsman, a born decorator, and very, very rich. Soon, he meets beautiful Lena, who’s visiting her grandmother Odette, Declan’s friendly Cajun neighbor. Declan is as certain that Lena is destined to be his wife as he was that Manet Hall would become his home. But, surprise, Lena has a troubled past (like the house) and is determined to resist Declan’s courtship. While he suits Lena and works on the place, Declan experiences troubling dreams. It seems he’s actually reliving the novel’s parallel story, which took place in 1899. In that year, the maid, Abbey Manet (from whom Lena, coincidentally, is descended, and who married wealthy Lucian Manet), was raped and murdered by her brother-in-law Julian as she nursed her baby daughter. Her body was dumped into the bayou by her mother-in-law, who despised her. And grief-stricken husband Lucian, away at the time, being told that Abbey had run off, committed suicide. Now, in an unconvincing twist of gender and reincarnation, it’s Declan who hears a baby crying , experiences childbirth and rape as the reincarnation of Abbey, while Lena is Lucian. The two accept all this with equanimity, and, Manet Hall’s secrets revealed, it becomes the setting for predictable and much foreshadowed resolutions.
Agreeably credible lovers and a neat piece of home-restoration compensate some for the hokey hauntings on the bayou. Loyal fans will enjoy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14824-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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