Duffy (Gun Street Girl, 2015, etc.) is taking no better care of himself than he ever did. But his copper’s instincts are as...
During the Irish Troubles, a discouraged detective tackles a murder oddly similar to a past crime.
The excitement of meeting Muhammad Ali on his Belfast visit quickly fades for DI Sean Duffy. He’d thought he and his girlfriend were doing fine, but she’s determined to walk out on him, and he’s depressed to be left behind. He’s pushing 40, his career with the Royal Ulster Constabulary is stalled, and he has nothing to look forward to but checking for bombs under his car on his way to the Carrick station and pursuing a case of a missing wallet. But Duffy’s superiors want him to take the case seriously because the victim is a visiting Finnish businessman who can bring money and jobs to Northern Ireland. After privately writing off the robbery as a prank, Duffy meets Lily Bigelow, a young reporter from the Financial Times, who’s hoping for a few words about the case. Duffy’s hoping for a date with her, and his disappointment that she doesn’t take him up on it turns to shock when he sees her dead body in the courtyard of Carrickfergus Castle the next day. Lily had come for a tour and stayed behind when the caretaker locked up the castle for the night, and the only logical conclusions are that she jumped or the caretaker pushed her. Even though it seems impossible for anyone else to have entered the locked castle, neither Duffy nor his two junior colleagues are content to go with the obvious answers. And there's still the matter of Lily's missing journalist's notepad. When a violent murder turns the station upside down, Duffy can’t shake the feeling that it’s connected to Lily’s death, and he won’t give up the case, no matter how far it takes him or what the danger.
Duffy (Gun Street Girl, 2015, etc.) is taking no better care of himself than he ever did. But his copper’s instincts are as sharp as ever in this fifth installment.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63388-130-3
Page Count: 315
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Provocative, entertaining and beautifully written. It’s not quite the tour de force that her Case Histories (2004) was, but...
If you could travel back in time and kill Hitler, would you? Of course you would.
Atkinson’s (Started Early, Took My Dog, 2011, etc.) latest opens with that conceit, a hoary what-if of college dorm discussions and, for that matter, of other published yarns (including one, mutatis mutandis, by no less an eminence than George Steiner). But Atkinson isn’t being lazy, not in the least: Her protagonist’s encounter with der Führer is just one of several possible futures. Call it a more learned version of Groundhog Day, but that character can die at birth, or she can flourish and blossom; she can be wealthy, or she can be a fugitive; she can be the victim of rape, or she can choose her sexual destiny. All these possibilities arise, and all take the story in different directions, as if to say: We scarcely know ourselves, so what do we know of the lives of those who came before us, including our own parents and—in this instance—our unconventional grandmother? And all these possibilities sometimes entwine, near to the point of confusion. In one moment, for example, the conversation turns to a child who has died; reminds Ursula, our heroine, “Your daughter....She fell in the fire,” an event the child’s poor mother gainsays: “ ‘I only ever had Derek,’ she concluded firmly.” Ah, but there’s the rub with alternate realities, all of which, Atkinson suggests, can be folded up into the same life so that all are equally real. Besides, it affords several opportunities to do old Adolf in, what with his “funny little flap of the hand backward so that he looked as if he were cupping his ear to hear them better” and all.
Provocative, entertaining and beautifully written. It’s not quite the tour de force that her Case Histories (2004) was, but this latest affords the happy sight of seeing Atkinson stretch out into speculative territory again.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-17648-4
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Catchy title; too bad the psychothriller behind it—despite the publisher's big push—is a mostly routine tale of cop vs. serial-killer. And it's really too bad for Patterson (The Midnight Club, 1988, etc.) that William Diehl's new thriller, Primal Fear (reviewed above), covers some of the same territory with superior energy and skill. A few charms lift this above run-of-the-mill: Patterson's hero, D.C. psychologist/cop Alex Cross, is black, while his lover, Secret Service honcho Jezzie Flanagan, is white; and the narrative moves briskly by cutting between Cross's ambling account and a sharper third-person tracking, mostly of the killer's movements. He is Gary Soneji—a nobody living a deceptively quiet life as Gary "Murphy"—who has killed 200 people and now wants to commit the Crime of the Century and become Somebody: Soneji/Murphy snatches the daughter of a top actress and the son of the US secretary of the treasury. Enter Cross and Flanagan, whose bad luck at finding kids and kidnapper—who, taunting the cops, kills an FBI agent and gets away with a $10-million payoff, while one of the kids turns up dead—changes only when Soneji/Murphy, cracking up, holds hostage to a McDonald's and is wounded by a cop. Here, Patterson's tale begins to mirror Diehl's: Soneji/Murphy turns out to suffer from the same sensational psychosis as Diehl's villain; and in the ensuing trial, Soneji/Murphy's lawyer pursues a defense similar to that of Diehl's attorney-hero. But where Diehl's villain roars on the page, Soneji/Murphy barely smirks; and while Diehl's courtroom crackles with intelligence, Patterson's is almost transcript-dull. Patterson does wind up, however, with a fine noir twist. Cross is a likable hero, but with a watery plot and weak villain—Hannibal Lecter would eat Soneji for breakfast—he doesn't have much to work with here.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-316-69364-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
BOOK TO SCREEN
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