Despite the variety, there’s nothing new here—and nothing that Pronzini (Nothing But the Night, 1999, etc.) hasn’t served up...
These 14 previously published stories (from EQMM, AHMM, etc.) include a cornball go-round for Nameless (“The Big Bite”) in which he outsmarts one client and outdumbs another; a long yawn for Gilded Age sleuths John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter (“The Highbinders”) that has them dodging Tong feuds, sniffing out opium dens, and locating a pilfered corpse; and a dreary SF adventure (“And Then We Went to Venus”) that drags along to a last-line meltdown. More successful are “Bank Job,” in which two heists intersect; “Wishful Thinking,” with its dueling marital fantasies; and “Liar’s Dice,” the ultimate stranger-at-the-bar encounter. A husband goes nuts in “Putting the Pieces Back,” and a wife stews interminably in “I Think I Will Not Hang Myself Today.” Also on hand: a paean to the pulps, “The Man Who Collected ‘The Shadow’ ”; a tale of extremely convoluted ratiocination, “The Arrowment Prison Riddle”; and a rollickingly original tale of house theft, “Caught in the Act.” For those who like a final twist, Pronzini provides “Shade Work,” a poker con’s comeuppance; “Out of the Depths,” an anecdote that throws a robber and an abuser up against a disgruntled housewife; and “The Dispatching of George Ferris,” a practical joker needled to death.
Despite the variety, there’s nothing new here—and nothing that Pronzini (Nothing But the Night, 1999, etc.) hasn’t served up fresher on other bills of fare. “Oddments” is right.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7862-2894-6
Page Count: 225
Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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