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and affable Ben Chambers, a wise and kindly gent who’s been everywhere, done everything—and written 20 novels, all unpublished (“I only wrote for myself,” says he) and all, presumably, about likable heroes (“If a reader doesn’t like the central character of a book, you got problems,”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
Locke, having stockpiled an acclaimed array of crime novels (Pleasantville, 2015, etc.), deserves a career breakthrough for...
What appears at first to be a double hate crime in a tiny Texas town turns out to be much more complicated—and more painful—than it seems.
With a degree from Princeton and two years of law school under his belt, Darren Mathews could have easily taken his place among the elite of African-American attorneys. Instead, he followed his uncle’s lead to become a Texas Ranger. “What is it about that damn badge?” his estranged wife, Lisa, asks. “It was never intended for you.” Darren often wonders if she’s right but nonetheless finds his badge useful “for working homicides with a racial element—murders with a particularly ugly taint.” The East Texas town of Lark is small enough to drive through “in the time it [takes] to sneeze,” but it’s big enough to have had not one, but two such murders. One of the victims is a black lawyer from Chicago, the kind of crusader-advocate Darren could have been if he’d stayed on his original path; the other is a young white woman, a local resident. Both battered bodies were found in a nearby bayou. His job already jeopardized by his role in a race-related murder case in another part of the state, Darren eases his way into Lark, where even his presence is enough to raise hackles among both the town’s white and black residents; some of the latter, especially, seem reluctant and evasive in their conversations with him. Besides their mysterious resistance, Darren also has to deal with a hostile sheriff, the white supremacist husband of the dead woman, and the dead lawyer’s moody widow, who flies into town with her own worst suspicions as to what her husband was doing down there. All the easily available facts imply some sordid business that could cause the whole town to explode. But the deeper Darren digs into the case, encountering lives steeped in his home state’s musical and social history, the more he begins to distrust his professional—and personal—instincts.
Locke, having stockpiled an acclaimed array of crime novels (Pleasantville, 2015, etc.), deserves a career breakthrough for this deftly plotted whodunit whose writing pulses throughout with a raw, blues-inflected lyricism.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-36329-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A top-notch psychological thriller.
In Hoag’s (The 9th Girl, 2013, etc.) latest, talented young newscaster Dana Nolan is left to navigate a psychological maze after escaping a serial killer.
While recuperating at home in Shelby Mills, Indiana, Dana meets her former high school classmates John Villante and Tim Carver. Football hero Tim is ashamed of flunking out of West Point, and now he’s a sheriff’s deputy. After Iraq and Afghanistan tours, John’s home with PTSD, "angry and bitter and dark." Dana survived abduction by serial killer Doc Holiday, but she still suffers from the gruesome attack by "the man who ruined her life, destroyed her career, shattered her sense of self, damaged her brain and her face." What binds the trio is their friend Casey Grant, who's been missing five years, perhaps also a Holiday victim, even if "[t]he odds against that kind of coincidence had to be astronomical." Hoag’s first 100 pages are a gut-wrenching dissection of the aftereffects of traumatic brain injury: Dana is plagued by "[f]ear, panic, grief, and anger" and haunted by fractured memories and nightmares. "Before Dana had believed in the inherent good in people. After Dana knew firsthand their capacity for evil." Impulsive and paranoid, Dana obsesses over linking Casey’s disappearance to Holiday, with her misfiring brain convincing her that "finding the truth about what had happened to Casey [was] her chance of redemption." But then Hoag tosses suspects into the narrative faster than Dana can count: Roger Mercer, Dana’s self-absorbed state senator stepfather; Mack Villante, who left son John with "no memories of his father that didn’t include drunkenness and cruelty"; even Hardy, the hard-bitten, cancer-stricken detective who investigated Casey’s disappearance. Tense, tightly woven, with every minor character, from Dana’s fiercely protective aunt to Mercer’s pudgy campaign chief, ratcheting up the tension, Hoag’s narrative explodes with an unexpected but believable conclusion.
A top-notch psychological thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95454-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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