A brooding novel of loyalty and corruption set on Chicago’s South Side.
In Allen’s novel, a low-level politician on the verge of retirement struggles to hold his family together in the aftermath of a murder.
One more election—that’s all Pat Sullivan, precinct captain of Chicago’s 51st Ward, has to make it through. For 32 years, he’s been in charge of curb repair, potholes, snow removal, and turning out votes in his working-class South Side neighborhood. Pat is preparing a final push to re-elect alderman Eddie Byrne, after which he plans to finally retire and move with his wife, Mary, out of the city. Pat’s plans are shattered when he learns that his daughter-in-law Janice has been murdered, and that her husband—Pat’s son Tom—has been arrested as the primary suspect. Pat puts up his house and savings in order to bail Tom out of jail, only for his son to immediately go on the lam. If Pat can’t get Tom into court within 30 days, his life’s earnings will be forfeited—and to top it all off, Mary reveals to him that she’s dying of breast cancer. To save what’s left of his family, Pat must track down Tom and figure out what really happened to Janice. Along the way, he will have to contend with a dogged police detective who’s sure of Tom’s guilt, a reformed drug dealer turned major political donor, and a colorful assortment of lowlifes who could only come from the Windy City. Allen’s conversational prose captures his milieu, particularly the relatively underexplored world of political machine turnout operations. (“The energized crowd started to file out of the hall, milling about in front, most holding literature and flyers to be passed out during the evening to each house in the ward.”) Less a traditional crime yarn than a literary novel with some genre elements, the book will please readers with its strong sense of place and culture.
A brooding novel of loyalty and corruption set on Chicago’s South Side.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798892820882
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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