Not as funny as Hiaasen’s best (Star Island, 2010, etc.), with a title character more vicious than amusing, but still the...
A severed arm that a visiting angler hooks off Key West kicks off Hiaasen’s 13th criminal comedy.
Though he’s anything but eager to follow Monroe County Sheriff Sonny Summers’ bidding and drive the arm to Miami to see if it belonged to some local stiff, the encounter Andrew Yancy has with Miami Assistant Medical Examiner Rosa Campesino, which ends with him taking the arm back home and parking it in his freezer, starts to change his attitude toward the case. Unfortunately, it doesn’t change the fact that he’s been suspended from the Sheriff’s Department and banished to the gruesome post of restaurant inspector. But once the arm is identified as that of developer Nicholas Stripling, Yancy, calling himself “Inspector Yancy,” takes it on himself to question Nicky’s wife, Eve, his estranged daughter, Caitlin Cox, Eve’s sworn enemy, and several other concerned parties. When two of these parties are shot to death very shortly after their chats with Yancy, he knows he’s onto something, even though the imperviously obtuse Sonny Summers doesn’t. Leaving behind his “future former girlfriend” Bonnie Witt, who’s just revealed an unexpectedly colorful personal history to him, Yancy takes Rosa along to follow the arm’s trail to Lizard Cay, Bahamas, where more crazies await: a toothless voodoo priestess called the Dragon Queen, her hapless client Neville Stafford, whose troubles bear an uncanny resemblance to Yancy’s own, and his companion Driggs, a monkey reputed to have worked on the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The mind-boggling plot will require yet another Hiaasen hurricane, a house fire, several perp walks for diverse felonies and a healthy dose of cleansing violence to bring down the curtain.
Not as funny as Hiaasen’s best (Star Island, 2010, etc.), with a title character more vicious than amusing, but still the gold standard for South Florida criminal farce.Pub Date: June 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-27259-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A terrifying page-turner with the complexities of fatherhood at its core.
The serial killer who terrorized a small British town by kidnapping and murdering five little boys has been locked up for over a decade. So who could have taken 6-year-old Neil Spencer?
"The first forty-eight hours following a disappearance are the most crucial." And yet one of those hours has gone by the time Neil's separated parents realize he never made it from his father's house to his mother's, a short walk he took alone. One of the main investigators of the crime is DI Pete Willis, who cracked a similar case years back and has never quite recovered from it, especially since one of the missing boys was never found. Is there an accomplice still on the loose? As Willis and his colleagues comb the town for clues about the disappearance, a recently widowed novelist and his young son move into what they don't yet know is called "the scary house." Jake is a bright but isolated child who has relied heavily on an imaginary friend and a Packet of Special Things for comfort since he came home from school one day to find his mother's lifeless body at the foot of the stairs. This move is meant to be a much-needed fresh start for the grieving and bewildered father and son, but from the start nothing goes right. On Jake's first day at his new school, the other children draw him into discussion about the missing boy and the Whisper Man who took him. Soon enough, Jake hears whispering too. North's novel pits nasty men submerged in evil against decent men struggling to do good; several father-son pairs reflect the challenges and darker possibilities of this relationship, though plotlines involving female characters are a bit undeveloped.
A terrifying page-turner with the complexities of fatherhood at its core.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31799-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sophomore slump.
More psychological suspense from the author of Final Girls (2017).
Anyone who grew up watching horror movies in the 1980s knows that summer camp can be a dangerous place. It certainly was for Emma Davis during her first stay at Camp Nightingale. The other three girls in her cabin disappeared one night, never to return. Fifteen years have passed, years in which Emma has revisited this ordeal again and again through her work as a painter. When she’s offered another opportunity to spend a summer at the camp, Emma barely hesitates. She’s ostensibly there to serve as an art instructor, but her real mission is to finally find out what happened to her friends. Thrillers are, by their very nature, formulaic. Sager met the demands of the genre while offering a fresh, anxiety-inducing story in Final Girls. The author is less successful here. Part of the problem is the pacing. It’s so slow that the reader has ample time to notice how contrived the novel’s setup is. Emma is clearly unwell, so her decision to go back to the site of her trauma makes some sense, but it’s hard to believe that the camp’s owners would want her back, especially since she played a pivotal role in turning one of them into a suspect and nearly ruining his life. As a first-person narrator, Emma withholds a lot of information, which feels fake and frustrating; moreover, the revelations—when they come—are hardly worth the wait. And it’s hard to trust an author who gets so many details wrong. For example, Emma’s first summer at Camp Nightingale would have been around 2003 or so. It beggars belief that a 13-year-old millennial wouldn’t be amply prepared for her first period, but that’s what Sager wants readers to think. There’s a contemporary scene in which girls walk by in a cloud of baby powder, Noxzema, and strawberry-scented shampoo, imagery that is intensely evocative of the 1970s and '80s—not so much 2018. The novel is shot through with such discordant moments, moments that lift us right out of the narrative and shatter the suspense.
Sophomore slump.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4307-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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