Butchery in abundance, gore galore, but Stuckey the Collector can’t carry the body bags for Hannibal the Cannibal.
Blackhearted serial killer vs. stouthearted female FBI agent, Round Two.
In Kava’s debut (A Perfect Evil, 2000), Agent Maggie O’Dell out-pointed Albert (The Collector) Stuckey and sent him up the river—but, alas, not permanently. On his way to the slammer, monstrous, misogynistic, and ever-so-opportunistic Stuckey takes advantage of jailer ineptitude and breaks free. A single thought then dominates his cankered brain: payback. Maggie O’Dell must be made to suffer in spades for the ignominious defeat inflicted on so eminent an evil genius. No hurry, though. In addition to being endlessly wicked, Stuckey is prodigiously rich; early on, before his schizoid self was outed, he made several (nonhomicidal) killings in the stock market. He can afford to luxuriate in the prospect of requited vengefulness, play the kind of cat-and-mouse game certain types of serial killers are reputed to get off on (or so their creators would have us believe). So a pretty young woman is kidnapped, raped, and brutally murdered after delivering pizza to Maggie; another who helped her select the perfect bottle of wine meets a similarly horrific fate. Soon enough Maggie gets the message. She’s being taunted. Actually, she’s being stalked in a particularly grisly way. Women who have had anything to do with her, no matter how tenuously, are being marked by Stuckey as potential prey in order to terrorize his real target. Maggie now is as frightened as Stuckey wants her to be. But Maggie frightened is Maggie with her competitive juices in full flow. Strike her, and she’ll strike back hard—as unlucky Stuckey discovers to his cost in a much-too-predictable denouement.
Butchery in abundance, gore galore, but Stuckey the Collector can’t carry the body bags for Hannibal the Cannibal.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55166-835-1
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are...
A perfect wife’s disappearance plunges her husband into a nightmare as it rips open ugly secrets about his marriage and, just maybe, his culpability in her death.
Even after they lost their jobs as magazine writers and he uprooted her from New York and spirited her off to his childhood home in North Carthage, Mo., where his ailing parents suddenly needed him at their side, Nick Dunne still acted as if everything were fine between him and his wife, Amy. His sister Margo, who’d gone partners with him on a local bar, never suspected that the marriage was fraying, and certainly never knew that Nick, who’d buried his mother and largely ducked his responsibilities to his father, stricken with Alzheimer’s, had taken one of his graduate students as a mistress. That’s because Nick and Amy were both so good at playing Mr. and Ms. Right for their audience. But that all changes the morning of their fifth anniversary when Amy vanishes with every indication of foul play. Partly because the evidence against him looks so bleak, partly because he’s so bad at communicating grief, partly because he doesn’t feel all that grief-stricken to begin with, the tide begins to turn against Nick. Neighbors who’d been eager to join the police in the search for Amy begin to gossip about him. Female talk-show hosts inveigh against him. The questions from Detective Rhonda Boney and Detective Jim Gilpin get sharper and sharper. Even Nick has to acknowledge that he hasn’t come close to being the husband he liked to think he was. But does that mean he deserves to get tagged as his wife’s killer? Interspersing the mystery of Amy’s disappearance with flashbacks from her diary, Flynn (Dark Places, 2009, etc.) shows the marriage lumbering toward collapse—and prepares the first of several foreseeable but highly effective twists.
One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are chilling.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-58836-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Though Eggers strives for a portentous, Orwellian tone, this book mostly feels scolding, a Kurt Vonnegut novel rewritten by...
A massive feel-good technology firm takes an increasingly totalitarian shape in this cautionary tale from Eggers (A Hologram for the King, 2012, etc.).
Twenty-four-year-old Mae feels like the luckiest person alive when she arrives to work at the Circle, a California company that’s effectively a merger of Google, Facebook, Twitter and every other major social media tool. Though her job is customer-service drudgework, she’s seduced by the massive campus and the new technologies that the “Circlers” are working on. Those typically involve increased opportunities for surveillance, like the minicameras the company wants to plant everywhere, or sophisticated data-mining tools that measure every aspect of human experience. (The number of screens at Mae’s workstation comically proliferate as new monitoring methods emerge.) But who is Mae to complain when the tools reduce crime, politicians allow their every move to be recorded, and the campus cares for her every need, even providing health care for her ailing father? The novel reads breezily, but it’s a polemic that’s thick with flaws. Eggers has to intentionally make Mae a dim bulb in order for readers to suspend disbelief about the Circle’s rapid expansion—the concept of privacy rights are hardly invoked until more than halfway through. And once they are invoked, the novel’s tone is punishingly heavy-handed, particularly in the case of an ex of Mae's who wants to live off the grid and warns her of the dehumanizing consequences of the Circle’s demand for transparency in all things. (Lest that point not be clear, a subplot involves a translucent shark that’s terrifyingly omnivorous.) Eggers thoughtfully captured the alienation new technologies create in his previous novel, A Hologram for the King, but this lecture in novel form is flat-footed and simplistic.
Though Eggers strives for a portentous, Orwellian tone, this book mostly feels scolding, a Kurt Vonnegut novel rewritten by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-35139-3
Page Count: 504
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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