Zero at the bone. Just the thing when you want something less good-natured and reflective than Lawrence Block’s tales of...
More criminal adventures for tougher-than-thou hireling Cross and his covey of Chicago assassins (Blackjack, 2012).
“Adventures” may not seem like the best word for an antihero who rarely ventures outside the dank comforts of Red 71, his secure bunker. But it’s appropriate to the episodic nature of his skullduggery this time. In rapid succession, Cross and his crew—Ace, his partner in the Double-X strip club; the deadly Amazon Tiger; man-child Princess and his killer Akita Sweetie; squeaky giant Rhino; Samoan doormen K-1 and K-2; Buddha, Condor and all the rest—do what needs to be done on a dozen different fronts. They dispose of the overly possessive boyfriend of the newest dancer in the Double-X. They deal with an undercover agent in their midst. They discuss plans to snap up houses on a crumbling block and rehab them. They discuss possible double crosses among the rehab financiers and how to deal with them. They take on a job of pest removal in the ranks of a Chicago mobster. They eliminate the weak link from a bunch of street kids they want to use as guards. They provide an unwitting organ donor for a patient whose wife is desperate. And although Cross keeps telling everyone who outlines a job to him that they don’t need to say anything else, they talk and talk, and when they’re done talking, they go out in the Shark Car and kill people: one bullet, one death. As new plots blossom, flit by and flame out, readers may think of a collection of short stories or a comic book without pictures.
Zero at the bone. Just the thing when you want something less good-natured and reflective than Lawrence Block’s tales of Keller the hit man.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-6881-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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
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