The tension the book produces is not so much what's going to happen as how much you are going to have to go through before...
An innocuous disturbance leads to a series of grotesque calamities in a Belgian town.
The innocuous disturbance is the sound of a wind farm's turbines, which prevents the town butcher from sleeping at night. That's it. That's the impetus for a story that leads to charges of indecent exposure, assault, murder, animal poisoning, attempted rape, and several graphically described bouts of diarrhea. The sleep-deprived butcher is the means by which the book proceeds along its escalating course of outrages. Along the way the novel takes care to detail the surliest, most suspicious, sadistic, or racist thoughts of the inhabitants. It's not that these are people whose flaws inadvertently draw them to disaster. Many of them are awful to begin with, and even the marginally sympathetic, or at least unobjectionable ones, are held at such a distance that no emotion is expended on them. This is the type of book that, as soon as a dog is introduced, you wait for it to be horribly killed. The narrative concern is not so much with, say, a person being killed as it is with the person's head exploding in blood and bone matter.
The tension the book produces is not so much what's going to happen as how much you are going to have to go through before reaching the end.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64286-016-0
Page Count: 180
Publisher: World Editions
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
Suspenseful, glamorous story of love, blackmail, and magic, set in New Orleans and Washington, D.C., about a family of high-class magicians practicing the time-honored profession of thievery. When magician Maxmillian Nouvelle adopts the 12-year-old runaway Luke Callahan, he gives him more than a family: He teaches him the secrets of blending what's real and what's not...giving people what they want—and also taking what they value. For the Great Nouvelle is a master jewel-thief; stealing from the undeserving rich warms his blood like the anticipation of good sex, a passion that both Luke and Max's bratty daughter Raxanne eventually share. Thirteen years pass: As Luke practices the fine arts of larceny and escapology, Roxanne grows into a flame-haired witch who turns bell, book, and candle into smoke onstage. Offstage, she trades in her David Cassidy poster for Luke; together, they set off sparks that could make an innocent bystander..go up in flames. But Luke's invincibility, like the Great Houdini's, is deceptive: Slimy Sam Wyatt—a former grifter now running for the Senate—slithers in from Luke's past, his frigid heart full of contempt for the family he once tried to seam. He threatens to frame Luke for murder and expose the Nouvelles' after-hours show unless he disappears. Five years later, a homesick Luke reappears, determined to show the disillusioned Roxanne that he's more than smoke and mirrors. Together, they set out to plot vengeance, staking everything on their most daring sting to date. True to the magician's oath, Roberts reveals no secrets, but the illusion works—in a compelling and detail-rich first hardcover. Good escape reading.
Pub Date: July 17, 1992
ISBN: 0-399-13761-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1992
Hoag finishes her crossover from sexy soft-cover romance to psychosexual thriller with this tale of tough Cajun loners looking for love in unlikely places. Heroine Annie Broussard is a deputy with the sheriff's office in Partout Parish in southern Louisiana. An orphan who's working hard to make detective, she's also devoted to getting rid of the sexual predators who victimize women. But just as her career seems to be looking up, Annie breaks an unwritten police law: She arrests a fellow officer, Nick Fourcade, when she finds him beating up a murder suspect. Annie should have let Fourcade kill him, say both her colleagues and the bayou parish citizens. After all, the suspect, Marcus Renard, had supposedly stalked Pam Bichon, a single mother. He'd driven stakes through her hands, raped her, killed her, eviscerated her, then left her wearing only a feathered Mardi Gras mask in a deserted cottage on Pony Bayou. Why not kill him? Switching his obsession from Pam to Annie, he maintains that he's innocent and begs Annie to help him. Working with Fourcade, who's suspended but still obsessed with the case, she seeks evidence to put the troubled Marcus legally behind bars. Meanwhile, someone's raping Louisiana women, and Marcus is too injured to be the perp. Is it Annie's lazy, mean-spirited colleague Stokes? Or Pam's husband, involved with a New Orleans racketeer from Fourcade's past? As Mardi Gras approaches, Annie, a cute kid who does 50 chin-ups a day and has an addiction to candy bars, wrestles with Fourcade's dangerous sexuality—fortunately a losing battle—and with the evil presence of deranged male predators that haunts so many recent suspense novels. Hoag (Guilty as Sin, 1996, etc.) is always a good gritty read, but this time a lack of sustained emotional tension makes the novel a long ride on soft tires.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-553-09960-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
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