Boston readers might enjoy the close attention to city landmarks, but there’s not much else to recommend this thriller.
An eclectic cast of characters converges in a self-storage warehouse where crime lurks in every unit.
“Metropolis” is the name of a seedy self-storage facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where several renters are hiding more than old furniture and paperwork. Liddy, a wealthy housewife with a violent husband, spends drug-fueled afternoons in a unit stuffed with her children's old toys. Jason, a lawyer fired from his prestigious firm and left by his wife, hangs a shingle outside his unit and practices law from a makeshift office inside. Marta, a brilliant Venezuelan graduate student whose visa has been revoked, lives in her unit while on the run from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The building’s owner, Zach, and his employee, Rose, look the other way when renters break the law by occupying units intended for inanimate objects. These arrangements might have continued peacefully were it not for a violent incident, foreshadowed on the first page, in which a man is seriously injured in the building’s elevator shaft. Through chapters narrated from the perspectives of several characters, the story of the incident—and its aftermath—unfolds slowly. Unfortunately, the characters are wooden, making it difficult to invest in their demise or salvation. The attempt to create a racially diverse cast flounders due to careless reliance on stereotypes. Black characters, including Jason, consistently curse more than White characters, both in unconvincing dialogue and in interior monologue. Marta, the undocumented immigrant, has little storyline beyond her panicked desire to stay in America. A snappy plot or spirited sentences might partially salvage the stock characters, but this novel has neither.
Boston readers might enjoy the close attention to city landmarks, but there’s not much else to recommend this thriller.Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-61620-958-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
A great conceit filled with unrealized potential.
An ardent young woman navigates a world in which technology has eradicated the need for sex for all but its most devout practitioners.
Amane is still a child when she learns the disturbing truth that her mother became pregnant with her through sexual intercourse with her father. In Amane’s Japan, technological advances designed to “produce lots of children for the war effort” have replaced traditional modes of conception; sex in general is considered to be old-fashioned and sex between husband and wife is seen as incest. In fact, many of Amane’s contemporaries find the idea of partnered sexual gratification so foreign that they are increasingly asexual, forging romantic attachments solely with anime characters. Amane, a rare woman who insists on sex, creates a division between the romantic life she enjoys with both real-life boyfriends and the 40 characters she loves and the sexless family life she’s built with her husband, Saku; this works well until Amane’s mid-30s. In the throes of a difficult love affair of his own, her husband decides to move to Experiment City, a government-run enclave where the last vestiges of the “family system” are being eradicated in favor of algorithm-controlled breeding. In spite of her doubts, Amane joins him in the name of “the religion of family,” but she can’t help but bring her belief in the physical union of two bodies along with her. The novel’s frank exploration of desire from the perspective of an entire civilization of naïfs exposes some base-level assumptions about the part sexual reproduction plays in society. Unfortunately, the naïveté of the main characters seems to imprint on the novel itself, with the result that even the most potentially incendiary elements of this new world order are explored with neither nuance nor depth. The characters remain suspended in a kind of enforced adolescence—unable to either grow from worldly experience or totally abandon their society’s inherited structures and forge something new.
A great conceit filled with unrealized potential.Pub Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780802164667
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.
Stephanie Plum’s 31st adventure shows that Trenton’s preeminent fugitive-apprehension agent still has plenty of tricks up her sleeve, and needs every one of them.
The current caseload for Stephanie and Lula—the ex-prostitute file clerk at her cousin Vincent Plum’s bail bonds company, who serves as her unflappable sidekick—begins with two “failures to appear.” Eugene Fleck is suspected of being Robin Hoodie, who robs from the rich and, yes, distributes the proceeds to the poor. Racketeer Bruno Jug, who’s missed his court date on charges of tax evasion, is also suspected of drugging and raping a 14-year-old. But neither of these fugitives can hold a candle to Zoran Djordjevic, aka Fang, a self-proclaimed vampire wanted in connection with the gruesome fate of his late wife and three other missing women. As usual, Stephanie’s personal life is just as helter-skelter as her professional life as a bounty hunter. She’s managed to get herself engaged both to Det. Joe Morelli, of the Trenton PD, and Ranger, a former Special Forces agent who runs a private security firm; she thinks she may be pregnant; and she’s willing to marry the father, whichever of her fiances that turns out to be. On top of it all, her nothingburger schoolmate Herbert Slovinski suddenly pops up at one of the funerals she ferries her Grandma Mazur to, hitting on her relentlessly and gilding his importunities by cleaning and painting her shabby apartment and laying new carpet. Luckily, Lula’s on hand to offer cupcakes that stave off the worst disasters, and whenever this hodgepodge threatens to slow down, another FTA appears, or fails to appear.
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781668003138
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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