A worthy pop-cult amusement, if sometimes reading like cutting-room-floor Stephen King mixed up with a little Boris and...
Henry Kissinger, dark lord of the universe?
If you’re a student of the late Christopher Hitchens or William Shawcross, the idea won’t seem far-fetched. Grossman (You, 2013, etc.) takes it into fictional realms with this oddball book, which opens with none other than “Tricky” Dick Nixon giving a long soliloquy of a confession: “I outlived the hippies,” he says, “I outlived Elvis and Marlene Dietrich and the Soviet Union itself. It’s been twenty years since I was forced to stage my own death.” Say what? A stake doesn’t hold his heart to the Yorba Linda soil? Nope, for the eternal Nixon, bearing an eldritch tattoo administered by Henry the K and full of secrets and lies, isn’t the only evil being in the piece; indeed, after a fashion, as “the last of the American sorcerer-presidents,” he’s been helping save the world from all manner of mischief that plays out under the general rubric of the Cold War, giving new meaning to the phrase “Evil Empire.” It takes Grossman, who’s apparently been reading up on his H.P. Lovecraft, a while to fill this saggy balloon with enough gas to give it loft, and there’s way too much talk and way too little action, unless you count Pat Nixon’s discussion of her voting record as action. A sometimes-confusing timeline doesn’t help matters. Still, and even if the story is an inconsequential confection in the end, it’s pleasing to allow Nixon, who revisits his checkered career throughout Grossman's pages, supernatural leeway in explaining how he could have betrayed the public trust so badly—and pleasing to imagine, with Grossman, that he wasn’t really talking about football with those protestors at the Lincoln Memorial on that cold night all those years ago. And as for conspiracy theory? Well, let Kissinger take you down the miles and miles of secret corridors at the Pentagon—not the 17 miles that we know of but the places underground where the nukes live, ready to put an end to the world way back in our bicentennial year, “the final one of the American Republic.”
A worthy pop-cult amusement, if sometimes reading like cutting-room-floor Stephen King mixed up with a little Boris and Natasha.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-19851-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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