Clumsy, mechanical, inane: a kind of YA for adults, sophomoric and repugnant at once.
Reid, we’re told, is actually a “longtime New York publishing executive” who “spent a career” in the business. Whatever. His story about an opportunistic writer is a mediocrity and rather repellent.
Steven King—pen name Konigsberg, his family’s original surname—is having trouble getting his books published, even though he did go to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and does have his own cousin Stuart for a shark-like agent. Making ends meet by bartending in Maine, however, 30ish Steven gets lucky when he’s befriended by the older and affable Ben Chambers, a wise and kindly gent who’s been everywhere, done everything—and written 20 novels, all unpublished (“I only wrote for myself,” says he) and all, presumably, about likable heroes (“If a reader doesn’t like the central character of a book, you got problems,” he tells eager novice Steven). As luck would have it—though of course it’s very sad, he was so kind and so nice—Ben soon dies (manfully and quietly, of course) of heart trouble and leaves everything he had to his new friend and wannabe writer Steven. How long does it take him, agented by the cartoonishly crass Stuart, to get rich and famous by publishing the first of Ben’s 20 novels—under the name Konigsberg? Well, let’s just say that Steven is rocketed right up there among the high-rolling gods of bestsellerdom, and, hey, he’s still got 19 more hits to go! Even when a few worms who knew the real Ben Chambers crawl out of the woodwork to blackmail Steven, things work out. One of the worms gets shot dead, Steven is implicated—but a cop who loves Steven’s books and knows he’s innocent buries the evidence, becoming afterward a writing student under the master. When his wife discovers what he’s been doing all along, Steven turns over a major new leaf: he doesn’t publish any more of the books, sets up a good-deeds foundation instead.
Clumsy, mechanical, inane: a kind of YA for adults, sophomoric and repugnant at once.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50621-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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
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
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