DeSilva, drawing on a real-life case, pours on the ethical complications with such unrelenting suspense that you’ll be glad...
DeSilva’s third visit to Rhode Island tracks the potentially dire consequences of trying a 15-year-old killer as a juvenile instead of locking him up and throwing away the key.
The first time Liam Mulligan (Cliff Walk, 2012, etc.) gets pulled off the sports desk at the Providence Dispatch, he’s sent out to cover the brutal murder of Becky Medeiros and her daughter Jessica, 4, in suburban Warwick. Their killer, not exactly a criminal mastermind, left so much trace evidence at the scene that it’s a simple matter to confirm that he’s the perp when Connie Stuart and her two daughters are slaughtered two years later. Mulligan, who’s made a friend and confidant of Andy Jennings, the cop in charge of the case, provides some sharp observations and asks a few good questions of his own. The result is the arrest and conviction of neighborhood teen Kwame Diggs. Tried as a juvenile, Diggs is supposed to be released when he’s 21. But he’s still in a maximum security cell 18 years later because the prison authorities have found one infraction after another to charge him with. When Edward Anthony Mason III, son of the Dispatch’s publisher, gets it into his crusading head to investigate whether the charges that have extended Diggs’ prison term are on the level, he unleashes a firestorm of protest from right-wing radio firebrand Iggy Rock, thousands of subscribers the struggling Dispatch can ill afford to lose, and of course Mulligan himself, who sees no reason that a sociopath like Diggs should ever be freed, especially now that he’s had nearly two decades to choose his next targets and reflect on the mistakes that got him caught.
DeSilva, drawing on a real-life case, pours on the ethical complications with such unrelenting suspense that you’ll be glad you don’t live in Rhode Island. Only the last few chapters are a letdown from the general excellence.Pub Date: March 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7429-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
PROFILES
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by...
Almost as frustrating as it is commanding, McCarthy’s ninth (and first since the completion of his Border Trilogy: Cities of the Plain, 1998, etc.) is a formidable display of stunningly written scenes that don’t quite cohere into a fully satisfying narrative.
It’s a bleak chronicle of murder, revenge and implacable fate pocked with numerous echoes of McCarthy’s great Blood Meridian (1985). Here, the story’s set in 1980 in southern Texas near the Mexican border, where aging Sheriff Bell, a decorated WWII veteran, broods heroically over the territory he’s sworn to protect, while—in a superb, sorrowful monologue—acknowledging the omnipresence of ineradicable evil all around him. Then the focus trains itself on Vietnam vet Llewellyn Moss, a hunter who stumbles upon several dead bodies, a stash of Mexican heroin and more than $2 million in cash that he absconds with. The tale then leaps among the hunted (Moss), an escaped killer (Anton Chigurh), whose crimes include double-crossing the drug cartel from which the money was taken, the Army Special Forces freelancer (Carson Wells) hired by druglords and—in dogged pursuit of all the horrors spawned by their several interactions—the intrepid, however flawed and guilty, stoical Sheriff Bell: perhaps the most fully human and sympathetic character McCarthy has ever created. The justly praised near-biblical style, an artful fusion of brisk declarative sentences and vivid, simple images, confers horrific intensity on the escalating violence and chaos, while precisely dramatizing the sense of nemesis that pursues and punishes McCarthy’s characters (scorpions in a sealed bottle). But this eloquent melodrama is seriously weakened by its insufficiently varied reiterated message: “if you were Satan . . . tryin to bring the human race to its knees, what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by William Faulkner.Pub Date: July 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40677-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
IN THE NEWS
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.
Things are about to get bloody for a group of Charleston housewives.
In 1988, the scariest thing in former nurse Patricia Campbell’s life is showing up to book club, since she hasn’t read the book. It’s hard to get any reading done between raising two kids, Blue and Korey, picking up after her husband, Carter, a psychiatrist, and taking care of her live-in mother-in-law, Miss Mary, who seems to have dementia. It doesn’t help that the books chosen by the Literary Guild of Mt. Pleasant are just plain boring. But when fellow book-club member Kitty gives Patricia a gloriously trashy true-crime novel, Patricia is instantly hooked, and soon she’s attending a very different kind of book club with Kitty and her friends Grace, Slick, and Maryellen. She has a full plate at home, but Patricia values her new friendships and still longs for a bit of excitement. When James Harris moves in down the street, the women are intrigued. Who is this handsome night owl, and why does Miss Mary insist that she knows him? A series of horrific events stretches Patricia’s nerves and her Southern civility to the breaking point. (A skin-crawling scene involving a horde of rats is a standout.) She just knows James is up to no good, but getting anyone to believe her is a Sisyphean feat. After all, she’s just a housewife. Hendrix juxtaposes the hypnotic mundanity of suburbia (which has a few dark underpinnings of its own) against an insidious evil that has taken root in Patricia’s insular neighborhood. It’s gratifying to see her grow from someone who apologizes for apologizing to a fiercely brave woman determined to do the right thing—hopefully with the help of her friends. Hendrix (We Sold Our Souls, 2018, etc.) cleverly sprinkles in nods to well-established vampire lore, and the fact that he’s a master at conjuring heady 1990s nostalgia is just the icing on what is his best book yet.
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68369-143-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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