From less than promising material, Black fashions a meticulously written installment notable for its palpable sense of...
Solving a case has a profound effect on its investigator in this Dublin-set thriller.
Black (the pen name of Man Booker Prize–winning John Banville) centers his seventh Quirke episode around two well-worn—and less than breathtaking—plot elements. First comes a suspicious suicide. Initially, it appears that Leon Corless died after he slammed his car into a tree. But Dublin pathologist Quirke’s autopsy reveals a traumatic blow to the victim’s skull, a fatal wound that did not result from the collision. A few days later, Lisa Smith, a fearful, agitated young woman, approaches Phoebe Griffin, Quirke’s daughter. Smith, who knows Phoebe from a class they took, insists she's in great danger and begs Phoebe to shelter her. Lisa then relates the story of a boyfriend, Leon Corless, the very same man killed in the auto accident Quirke is about to investigate, and adds that she's pregnant with Leon's child. Phoebe spirits Lisa to the coastal town of Ballytubber. Shortly thereafter, Lisa goes missing, a predictable and familiar plot turn. The two-pronged case brings Quirke back into action after a two-month convalescence for a brain lesion. He suffers as well from a personal crisis, struggling to control a drinking problem and feeling “no great thirst in himself for justice and the righting of wrongs.” He pictures himself as “a child standing alone in the midst of a vast, bare plain, with nothing behind him but darkness and storm.” Black skillfully interweaves the case that ensues with Quirke’s maladies. Working with his “old companion-in-arms,” Inspector Hackett, Quirke finds himself in "a sticky place with the powers that be": it appears that Corless had been probing “sensitive” mother and child issues that tie to the Catholic Church and to organized crime. The case plays out as Black’s splendidly described Dublin endures a heat wave, and the investigation’s tense, yet largely nonviolent, resolutions carry great resonance for Quirke.
From less than promising material, Black fashions a meticulously written installment notable for its palpable sense of place, a slate of fully drawn characters, and a meaningful denouement.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62779-066-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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