A conventional thriller elevated by its glimpses into a bookish milieu.
A recovering forger reveals the seedy underside of the well-mannered world of bookmen, corpses and all.
Unreliable narrators may be, well, unreliable, but they do abide by certain rules. They must be wickedly intelligent and rhetorically charming, but a slight but noticeably sinister tone needs to slither around their words too, giving a sense that they’re pleading for respect a little too strenuously. On that score, Will, the narrator of Morrow’s seventh novel (The Diviner’s Tale, 2011, etc.), is a fine creation. It’s easy to be suspicious of him from the first pages, when he tells us he was a forger and that his girlfriend’s brother, a rare-book collector named Adam, died a bloody (and unsolved) death in New York. But Will’s eloquence lets us submit to his story, a complex tale that turns on his skill at mimicking the handwriting and signatures of 19th-century writers. (Arthur Conan Doyle is a particular favorite.) As Will tells it, he went straight years before the murder, and Adam’s death has only prompted him to be more caring for Meghan, whom he marries and tries to begin a new life with in Ireland. But another forger is on Will’s tail, eager to exploit his past actions, opening up the question of just how nefarious Will's deeds were. In Morrow’s hands the story gets a bit convoluted, and there are moments when he can’t sustain Will’s high-strung yet intellectual tone. But the book is also a pleasurable study of the lives of book dealers, for whom holding a copy of a rare Yeats collection or a handwritten Darwin letter is a heart-stopping event. Morrow’s well-researched passages on the collector’s art meshes well with Will’s romantic longueurs about the life of fakery he left behind—or so he says.
A conventional thriller elevated by its glimpses into a bookish milieu.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 9780802123213
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
No wonder Scarpetta asks, “When did my workplace become such a soap opera?” Answer: at least 10 years ago.
Happy birthday, Dr. Kay Scarpetta. But no Florida vacation for you and your husband, FBI profiler Benton Wesley—not because President Barack Obama is visiting Cambridge, but because a deranged sniper has come to town.
Shortly after everyone’s favorite forensic pathologist (Dust, 2013, etc.) receives a sinister email from a correspondent dubbed Copperhead, she goes outside to find seven pennies—all polished, all turned heads-up, all dated 1981—on her garden wall. Clearly there’s trouble afoot, though she’s not sure what form it will take until five minutes later, when a call from her old friend and former employee Pete Marino, now a detective with the Cambridge Police, summons her to the scene of a shooting. Jamal Nari was a high school music teacher who became a minor celebrity when his name was mistakenly placed on a terrorist watch list; he claimed government persecution, and he ended up having a beer with the president. Now he’s in the news for quite a different reason. Bizarrely, the first tweets announcing his death seem to have preceded it by 45 minutes. And Leo Gantz, a student at Nari’s school, has confessed to his murder, even though he couldn’t possibly have done it. But these complications are only the prelude to a banquet of homicide past and present, as Scarpetta and Marino realize when they link Nari’s murder to a series of killings in New Jersey. For a while, the peripheral presence of the president makes you wonder if this will be the case that finally takes the primary focus off the investigator’s private life. But most of the characters are members of Scarpetta’s entourage, the main conflicts involve infighting among the regulars, and the killer turns out to be a familiar nemesis Scarpetta thought she’d left for dead several installments back. As if.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-232534-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying...
King (Under the Dome, 2009, etc.) adds counterfactual historian to his list of occupations.
Well, not exactly: The author is really turning in a sturdy, customarily massive exercise in time travel that just happens to involve the possibility of altering history. Didn’t Star Trek tell us not to do that? Yes, but no matter: Up in his beloved Maine, which he celebrates eloquently here (“For the first time since I’d topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Dery hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy”), King follows his own rules. In this romp, Jake Epping, a high-school English teacher (vintage King, that detail), slowly comes to see the opportunity to alter the fate of a friend who, in one reality, is hale and hearty but in another dying of cancer, no thanks to a lifetime of puffing unfiltered cigarettes. Epping discovers a time portal tucked away in a storeroom—don’t ask why there—and zips back to 1958, where not just his friend but practically everyone including the family pets smokes: “I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by.” A different world indeed: In this one, Jake, a sort of sad sack back in Reality 1, finds love and a new identity in Reality 2. Not just that, but he now sees an opportunity to unmake the past by inserting himself into some ugly business involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, various representatives of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and JFK in Dallas in the fall of 1963. It would be spoiling things to reveal how things turn out; suffice it to say that any change in Reality 2 will produce a change in Reality 1, not to mention that Oswald may have been a patsy, just as he claimed—or maybe not. King’s vision of one outcome of the Kennedy assassination plot reminds us of what might have been—that is, almost certainly a better present than the one in which we’re all actually living. “If you want to know what political extremism can lead to,” warns King in an afterword, “look at the Zapruder film.”
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying yarn.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2728-2
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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