A vibrant but uneven thriller involving a terrifying game.
In this novel, a lawyer gets drawn into a deadly game and turns to her criminal father for help extricating herself.
Maxine Shaw is a successful Black public defender in Cincinnati—as hard-nosed as she is astute. She’s assigned a peculiar case that just doesn’t add up—Mitchell Landing, an honors student at Xavier University, is accused of murdering DaVita Nelson, a close friend. Maxine consults her mentor, Mike Benton, a retired police detective, who furtively searches Mitchell’s apartment and finds a gun legally licensed to him, but not the one used in the commission of the crime. Then, Maxine searches Mitchell’s laptop and finds a link to a strange website that simultaneously warns against entry and invites it. When curiosity gets the better of her, she is informed that she has been enlisted in a deadly game in which she must perform dangerous tasks or risk the death of herself or a loved one. After she shares this information with Mike, he is murdered. Maxine contacts her estranged father, Ernesto, in search of help—he is a career criminal with deep knowledge of the seedy underworld. He warns her that she has been drawn into a battle that originates with a mysterious organization established in the 11th century by English nobleman David Jonathan Kingsley. The group ultimately split into two warring factions, one side representing good and the other evil. Baltimore deftly offers humor throughout the tale—the entire book is written in a lighthearted manner, its principal virtue. But while the story offers a striking and diverse cast of characters, the premise is implausible and melodramatic. The author seems aware of this element; consider this observation by Maxine: “I know this shit sounds all cloak and dagger, but I swear to God I’m glad my father taught me to prepare for the worst. I’ve gotten myself in quite a few fucked up situations in the past, but this...I’m scared to death.” Unfortunately, the novel’s comic relief is not enough to compensate for the tale’s missteps.
A vibrant but uneven thriller involving a terrifying game.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2022
ISBN: 9781684897568
Page Count: 405
Publisher: Primedia eLaunch LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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