A small-town cop teams up with a former member of a southern California Satan-worshiping cult who helps him take back his kidnaped daughter. Quietly upright police officer Bob Hightower is shocked to his boots when he makes a friendly Christmas-morning visit to the desert home of his ex-wife and her husband. Not only have both been murdered, but the family dogs are stuffed head-first into the toilet; their horse has been mutilated; and Hightower’s 14-year-old daughter Gabi is missing. We’re told that Bob’s superior, the sleazy Captain John Lee Bacon, knows not only why the killings occurred, but also enjoys a special relationship with sadistic monster Cyrus, the Manson-like leader of half a dozen tattooed, pierced, and drug-crazed psychopaths who call themselves the Cult of the Left-Handed Path. Bacon discourages Hightower from running down leads—and Hightower persists, digging up Case Hardin, a former Left-Hander trying to kick her heroin habit in an East L.A. shelter for abused women. Hardin, like just about everyone else in this overblown blood-splatterer, clogs her crude soliloquies about evil and social complacency with obscenities and rock-—n—-roll lyrics. Still, she eventually helps Hightower to find Cyrus. Along the way, Hightower, a semi-devout Christian, has to pass some pretty gruesome rites of passage, get himself tattooed, and cultivate his bloodlust—a sight savored by motor-mouth Cyrus. He finally discovers that Cyrus supplies drugs, sex, and the occasional murder-for-hire to Bacon and others. Absconding with funds from a brutal robbery, Hightower and Case offer to swap swag for Gabi, inciting a flame-lit shoot-out. Ludicrously bad prose (a salt flat is “laid barren as if it were the hub of a nuclear holocaust or that Devonian moment when the earth was catapulted out of mystery and all was flung aside”). And as for the plotting . . . when it isn’t awful bloody, it’s bloody awful. (First printing of 75,000)
Pub Date: April 5, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40188-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Thin characters, fat plot-holes, sluggish pacing and Cussler’s signature clunky prose.
The smartest shamus on earth tracks the planet’s cleverest lowlife in the latest to roll from the Cussler assembly line (Polar Shift, 2005, etc.).
In 1906, they didn’t come any nastier than the Butcher Bandit, who, when the book opens, has already racked up 38 kills, a goodly number of them women and children. He robs banks, murdering—remorselessly—any unfortunate who happens to be on the premises at the time. So adept at the work is he, we’re told exhaustively, that he’s commonly believed to be uncatchable. Which is why Isaac (“He always gets his man”) Bell of the Van Dorn Detective Agency is assigned the case. But the Butcher Bandit is a slippery one indeed. Not only brilliant, audacious and cold-blooded beyond measure, he is also not the stuff of which bottom-feeders are usually made. For it turns out that the master criminal who has robbed banks all over the Southwest is actually a bank president himself. In San Francisco, the extremely solvent Cromwell Bank is a byword for respectability, its founder and chief executive a pillar of the community. That would be Jacob Cromwell, aka the much sought after Butcher Bandit. So how to explain Cromwell’s deep, dark plunge into criminality? He loves the challenge, he says. There’s also that new word, Bell explains to an understandably puzzled colleague, that psychology professionals are beginning to use: sociopath. At any rate, the game’s afoot, the antagonists perfectly matched, with Cromwell convinced he can rob, kill and elude capture, and Bell promising not to rest “until I capture the man responsible for these hideous crimes.”
Thin characters, fat plot-holes, sluggish pacing and Cussler’s signature clunky prose.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-15438-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
Locke, having stockpiled an acclaimed array of crime novels (Pleasantville, 2015, etc.), deserves a career breakthrough for...
What appears at first to be a double hate crime in a tiny Texas town turns out to be much more complicated—and more painful—than it seems.
With a degree from Princeton and two years of law school under his belt, Darren Mathews could have easily taken his place among the elite of African-American attorneys. Instead, he followed his uncle’s lead to become a Texas Ranger. “What is it about that damn badge?” his estranged wife, Lisa, asks. “It was never intended for you.” Darren often wonders if she’s right but nonetheless finds his badge useful “for working homicides with a racial element—murders with a particularly ugly taint.” The East Texas town of Lark is small enough to drive through “in the time it [takes] to sneeze,” but it’s big enough to have had not one, but two such murders. One of the victims is a black lawyer from Chicago, the kind of crusader-advocate Darren could have been if he’d stayed on his original path; the other is a young white woman, a local resident. Both battered bodies were found in a nearby bayou. His job already jeopardized by his role in a race-related murder case in another part of the state, Darren eases his way into Lark, where even his presence is enough to raise hackles among both the town’s white and black residents; some of the latter, especially, seem reluctant and evasive in their conversations with him. Besides their mysterious resistance, Darren also has to deal with a hostile sheriff, the white supremacist husband of the dead woman, and the dead lawyer’s moody widow, who flies into town with her own worst suspicions as to what her husband was doing down there. All the easily available facts imply some sordid business that could cause the whole town to explode. But the deeper Darren digs into the case, encountering lives steeped in his home state’s musical and social history, the more he begins to distrust his professional—and personal—instincts.
Locke, having stockpiled an acclaimed array of crime novels (Pleasantville, 2015, etc.), deserves a career breakthrough for this deftly plotted whodunit whose writing pulses throughout with a raw, blues-inflected lyricism.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-36329-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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