(Ed.’s note: On 31 October 2001 Professor von Kirkus, suffering from a severe, rough, fishlike scaling, babbling...
From the notebooks of Professor Kruger von Kirkus, Doctor of Lovecraftology:
I first came across this ms. in a labyrinth beneath the earth’s crust, a gigantic calcium cathedral once inhabited, now ravaged and abandoned, and bearing slime traces of the passage of mind-eating telepaths known as Thuun’Ha, the sentient offspring of those cultists of Cthulhu who feed on the brains of luminous lizards and mentally twisted young humans. What to make of these stiffly encrusted pages? Carbon-dating places the eldest back to 1969, while others smell of a mold found only in the fruiting fungi of Arkham House. Indeed, scratched on an early page are the words, “By the Unholy Author of Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi (1996).” The longest entry in this ms. is labeled “Beneath the Moors” (first published by Arkham House in 1974) and reads like a bad head injury. This tells of a descent into the Devil’s Pool and the crumbling remnants of a long-lost underground fish civilization, if this ichthyotic alien species can be called civilized. Eight shorter entries leave one asking, What’s real? Are you real? Am I? “Dagon’s Bell,” a Lumleyization of Lovecraft’s “Deep Ones,” sets itself not in New England but under the phosphorescent rot and gurgling gases of nauseatingly miasmal kelp off the northeast coast of England. Readers dig at their skin and can barely breathe amid glowing putrescence, their brains choked by clotted and glutinous bursts of speech from slithering, slapping, flopping Deep Ones. “The Sun, the Sea, and the Silent Scream” tells of a woman’s scream so deep no sound comes out. “The Second Wish,” “Big ‘C’,” and “Rising with Surtsey,” all Cthulhu inspired, leave one in a blue glare under a gibbering moon.
(Ed.’s note: On 31 October 2001 Professor von Kirkus, suffering from a severe, rough, fishlike scaling, babbling deliriously, “They’re coming for me!” during a torrential rainfall, vanished into the Yorkshire Moors.)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-87694-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
Contains everything readers have come to expect from powerhouse Connelly. Bonus: Additional installments hold the intriguing...
Fresh from returning Harry Bosch to the LAPD with The Closers (2005), veteran crime novelist Connelly offers intrigue and bracing twists in his first legal thriller.
Criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller is known as a “Lincoln lawyer” because he does business while being driven from courthouse to courthouse in his Town Car. Scraping by by defending lowlifes, some of whom offer their chauffeur services to work off Haller’s fees, he stumbles across a dream client: a rich boy accused of viciously beating a woman. Most important for Haller, Louis Roulet loudly proclaims his innocence, and his family has the dough to pay top-dollar for representation. But Haller’s father, J. Michael Haller (making Bosch and Haller half-brothers, Connelly’s wink to longtime fans) said there was “no client as scary as an innocent man,” and soon Haller is confronted with the consequences that come from the system’s inevitable compromises. When Haller’s investigator and friend is murdered for getting too close to the truth, he’s forced to confront the cost of sacrificing ideals for pragmatism. To spill more plot detail would spoil a good deal of the considerable fun here; suffice to say the conflict sparks in Haller an epic case of cognitive dissonance. Connelly gets the legal details and maneuvers just right, and Haller is a great character—world-weary but funny and likable—he’s never met an angle he couldn’t play or a corner he couldn’t cut.
Contains everything readers have come to expect from powerhouse Connelly. Bonus: Additional installments hold the intriguing possibility of one day seeing Bosch and Haller together on the streets of L.A.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-316-73493-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
BOOK TO SCREEN
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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