The conclusion plays out a bit too neatly, but, still: savory, cozy, nicely textured, and very British.
Guardian Fiction Prize-winner Judd (The Devil’s Own Work, 1994), returns with a twisty, accomplished, and engaging Cold War thriller set in London of the 1970s, back when you knew where you stood—even if it turned out you were wrong.
Charlie Thoroughgood, stationed in Belfast in A Breed of Heroes (1981), has recently mustered out of the army and signed on with MI6. Very much like Clarice Starling, he’s pulled from his class of eager trainees and asked to take on a case; like her, his history and relative naiveté become a resource in the larger picture. The chummy collegiality of Charlie’s classmates extends upstairs; his superiors, the blustery, unnuanced Hugo March and the polished, self-contained Hookey, head of Soviet block operations, are both clubby gentlemen playing devious games. Russian agent Viktor Koslov, whom Charlie knew slightly at Oxford, is working out of the Soviet embassy, and his affair with a London prostitute (a Cabinet minister among her clients recalls the Profumo scandal) suggests he might be turned. When approached, though, Viktor delivers the gut-punch revelation that Charlie’s late father had been working for his side, and he attempts to bring Charlie over as well. Troubled, Charlie reports all, and feint and parry follow as MI6 plays his emotional turmoil as another card it’s been dealt. When the case is frozen to prevent exposure of the philandering Cabinet minister, Charlie resigns and strikes out on his own, determined to discover the truth about Dad. Amid a smooth blend of high drama and homely detail, secrets within secrets are uncovered, flirtations come and go, honor and duty are discussed (amusingly, Viktor and Hookey deliver similar lectures of self-indulgence: to Viktor a symptom of the West, to Hookey a sign of the times), and Charlie learns more about the sort of man he really is.
The conclusion plays out a bit too neatly, but, still: savory, cozy, nicely textured, and very British.Pub Date: April 14, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41484-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
A grim and unbearably tense debut chiller with an unexpected and utterly fitting finale.
A lonely British schoolteacher falls for an American man incarcerated for the murder of a young woman. What could possibly go wrong?
Samantha, 31, is still reeling from a bad breakup when she discovers Framing the Truth: The Murder of Holly Michaels, an 18-year-old true-crime documentary about the killing of a young girl by then-18-year-old Dennis Danson, aka the suspected Red River Killer, who’s still on death row in Florida’s Altoona Prison. Sam writes to Dennis, and soon they’re declaring their love for each other. Sam flies to the U.S. to meet him, and although they’re separated by plexiglass, she knows that she’s found the love of her life. The chirpy Carrie, who co-produced and directed the first documentary, is Sam’s guide while she’s there, and Sam accompanies her while they film a new series about Dennis, A Boy from Red River. Sam and Dennis quickly marry when new evidence comes to light and Dennis is exonerated and released. Amid a whirlwind of talk shows, celebrity attention, and the new series premiere, married life isn’t quite what Sam had hoped for: intimacy is nonexistent, the already self-loathing Sam feels unloved and unwanted, and the appearance of Dennis’ clingy childhood friend Lindsay Durst sends Sam into a jealous fit. After Dennis’ father dies, they move into Dennis’ childhood home, and Sam begins to suspect he may be hiding something. After all, what actually happened to all those other missing girls? Refreshingly, Lloyd seems absolutely unconcerned with whether or not her characters are likable, and although a few British sayings ("round," “in hospital”) make their way into the dialogue of the American characters, her research into the aftereffects of long incarceration is obvious, and her portrait of an emotionally damaged woman feels spot-on.
A grim and unbearably tense debut chiller with an unexpected and utterly fitting finale.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-335-95240-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Piercingly effective and genuinely terrifying.
A savage debut thriller that renders the Electra complex electric, the mother/daughter bond a psychopathic stranglehold.
Camille Preaker is a cutter. At 13, she carved “queasy” above her navel, at 29, “vanish” on her neck. In the intervening years, she etched her entire epidermis from the chin down with cries for help. Entertainment Weekly TV critic Flynn discloses this information 60 pages into her explosive novel; before that, we know Camille as a hard-drinking, good-looking Jimmy Breslin wannabe, sent by a second-tier paper to cover two gruesome killings in her Missouri hometown. Nine-year-old Natalie’s corpse was found jammed between the Cut-n-Curl Beauty Parlor and Bifty’s Hardware nine months after another’s girl’s body was dumped in a creek. The murderer’s grisly signature? Both strangled corpses had their teeth yanked out. As she snoops around, Camille gets hot for a cute detective and anxious in her mother’s house. Haunted by the ghost of her sister, a child felled by mysterious illness, Camille warily befriends half-sister Amma, a snaky Lolita with precociously developed smarts and breasts. Bite-sized Queen of Mean who rules the town’s teens, Amma joins Camille in shuddering at their mother, Aurora, an oh-so-proper virago who pulls down a million dollars a year running a pig slaughterhouse. Mommie Dearest is afflicted with an outré psychological disturbance: She inflicts illness on her loved ones to then prove her sweetness by nursing them. Could she be the slayer? Or perhaps an even more hideous revelation awaits? Flynn delivers a great whodunit, replete with hinting details, telling dialogue, dissembling clues. Better yet, she offers appalling, heartbreaking insight into the darkness of her women’s lives: the Stepford polish of desperate housewives, the backstabbing viciousness of drug-gobbling, sex-for-favors Mean Girls, the simmering rage bound to boil over.
Piercingly effective and genuinely terrifying.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-34154-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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