Often stiff and awkward but an informed addition to contemporary literature on African economics.
In the shady corners of modern Africa, a rare glimpse at the Nigerian petroleum industry and the dangerous contractors who deal in black gold.
Jobless, drunk and nearly broke, Bruce meets Steve, a shifty Englishman with a lucrative offer: if Bruce can broker deals with backcountry oil prospectors, he can earn a fortune from the black-market oil boom. Bruce, a native Nigerian, is uniquely qualified—he’s smart and has experience in the field. The story follows him through a series of transactions with warlords and transporters, including the hardened and charismatic Gen. Jojo. But after 10 years of buying “sweet crude,” Bruce’s relationships disintegrate, and he’s caught between impossible demands and escalating threats on his life. Painstakingly researched, the novel unveils a lawless country filled with profiteers, a morally ambiguous environment in which Bruce proves to be a very reluctant hero. It’s refreshing to meet such an unusual protagonist, a native African with a good heart who nevertheless earns money by hustling his own countrymen. Only his affection for an idealist named Kathy causes Bruce to second-guess his unsavory trade, and he struggles to draft an exit plan. Stylistically, the novel suffers from clunky exposition and weak physical descriptions, and the dynamic city of Lagos never comes fully into focus, nor do many of the story’s other exotic locations. But Sochi tells an engaging tale, and specific references and dialogue written in Nigerian pidgin lend the book a certain authority. The author capably describes Nigeria’s complex politics, with tension steadily building until the final pages. Beautiful women and hedonistic nights illustrate why Bruce’s business is so attractive, while grisly death scenes confirm the gravity of his situation if he fails. The tidy ending is a bit cliché, but the bloody path leading there is an important cautionary tale featuring a complicated man balancing ethics and poverty.
Often stiff and awkward but an informed addition to contemporary literature on African economics.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499567755
Page Count: 388
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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