Arriving on raves from Britain, Mathews’s first novel is touted as a marriage of Blade Runner and The Third Man. Could any thriller live up to such advance billing? Well, like Greene’s Harry Lime and Scott’s replicant-chaser Deckard, Mathews’s hero, society columnist Sharkey, has plenty of weight on the page, and his voice gives the story an exotic density of Weltschmerz and Schadenfreude woven amusingly with well-balanced electrono-pedantry and neo-Gibsoneque micrometric technojargon. (“In the breast pocket of the shirt was a C-series Bip-Bip Networker, powered by nanomechanical micro-reactors.”) Tittle-tattler Sharkey is called by Petra Detmers, the supremely attractive, extremely pregnant widow of Leo Detmers, a man Sharkey met but once, who has been killed by a car in Vienna’s Prater Park, scene of the sublime Ferris wheel episode in The Third Man. Petra has identified Leo’s body at the hospital, where all his body parts were harvested, and she thinks her husband was murdered. That makes Leo quite dead, doesn’t it? Will Sharkey help? The hack Sharkey says yes, but he isn—t exactly brimming with the self-confidence one would hope for in someone setting out to right a wrong: “I swear to God: If I wasn’t such a shit, I’d hate myself,” he informs us. The zither-dancing plot, set in 2026 during Vienna’s first snowfall in seven years and larded with Plasmavision screens, Holocolor photos, and Saarinen tulip chairs, turns on eugenics and bioengineering and roots back through the Gulf War to the gruesome tinkering of Hitler’s medical corps. The premise involves subjects of genetic experiments who have grown to adulthood—and a hero who may not be quite human himself. Tip-top charcoal character sketches, dandy dialogue, and atmospheric evocation of Vienna swimming in the dark waters of the future. The mood-showering prose slows the pace here and there, but that’s little to pay for solid entertainment.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-019341-7
Page Count: 386
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The laboriously manufactured drama yields so little payout that you may feel more manipulated than intrigued.
The disappearance of two teenage girls from a religious summer camp haunts their co-counselors and draws them back to the scene to learn what really happened.
All of Rev. Jeremiah Dalton’s Camp Horseshoe is in an uproar when two counselors go missing, one after the other. First it’s Elle Brady, the beautiful but melancholy girlfriend of Jeremiah’s son, Lucas. Elle hasn’t been herself the past few weeks. Could it be because Lucas has been spending time with another counselor, Bernadette Alsace, or perhaps the fact that she's pregnant, a secret that led her to consider taking her own life on the first page of the book? Readers who follow Elle’s torments will see her choose to live just in time to get pushed off a cliff. But that’s only the first of the shifts Jackson (Expecting to Die, 2017, etc.) makes between numerous protagonists past and present, a device designed to build drama that also tests readers’ attention and patience. After Elle disappears, another counselor, Monica, soon follows. In a story echoing Elle’s, readers learn that Monica is pregnant, too, after having had sex with a counselor named Tyler, and then she vanishes in a chapter that leaves her fate unclear. Tyler’s girlfriend, queen bee Jo-Beth Chancellor, may have had something to do with it, though the mystery appears to haunt all the characters. Some 20 years later, the original counselors plan to meet and discuss the night of Monica’s disappearance to get their stories straight, though many of them, like the reader, don’t seem quite clear on what they’re trying to hide.
The laboriously manufactured drama yields so little payout that you may feel more manipulated than intrigued.Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61773-466-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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