Rouff (Money Shot, 2004, etc.) spins a guilelessly winsome fable whose charming heroine needs to have everything from her...
A whirlwind romance leads an unlikely pair of newlyweds to Las Vegas, home of every dream and nightmare they can imagine—from predatory developers to a friendly ghost.
Small-town Michigan reporter Anna Christiansen never does get to interview visiting rocker Rob Lazarus, or even pick up the concert ticket she was told would be waiting for her. But her conversation with Dickweeds bass player Aaron Eisenberg, who takes pity on her, pays much bigger dividends. Sweet, soulful Aaron sweeps Anna off her feet so completely that she quits her job on the spot, bids her parents farewell, packs the bare essentials, and drives off with him to Vegas, the easiest place on the planet to get married. Settling into a not-terrible new gig, Anna sets about refurbishing the 1950s brick fortress they’ve bought on East St. Louis Avenue, in the shadow of the Pyke’s Peak Casino Hotel. A pregnancy quickly follows, exciting the newlyweds no end. Unfortunately, they’re less pleasantly surprised by the news that Pyke’s Peak, in search of more parking space, wants to buy every property on the block and level it and that all the neighbors, with the single exception of Capt. Charles T. Caldwell, a retired Marine, are not only willing to sell, but openly hostile toward Aaron and Anna for holding out. Attorney Marty Rosen darkly forecasts the scorched-earth campaign that will likely follow before sending them to his journalist friend Ed Scott, who promises to take up their cause shortly before he’s drowned on his Hawaii vacation. Their only hope is the counsel and inspiration of the late racketeer Meyer Levin, their resident ghost, who’s no more eager than they are to see his storied home knocked down and paved over.
Rouff (Money Shot, 2004, etc.) spins a guilelessly winsome fable whose charming heroine needs to have everything from her ghost’s personal history to the ritual significance of her newborn’s bris explained to her—which means that the reader gets treated to all these explanations too.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944877-06-4
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Huntington Press
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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
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