“I had a feeling he didn’t love me any more,” muses bobbing Joey, “but this is ridiculous.” It’s also bitingly satirical,...
Florida’s preeminent satirist returns from a YA excursion (Hoot, 2002) to ask the eternal question: What happens when the wife you’ve killed isn’t dead?
Joey Perrone can’t imagine why her husband married her or why he wanted to kill her. But it’s too late to ask now that Joey’s struggling to stay afloat several stories below the ship deck he pushed her from during their anniversary cruise. She doesn’t know that Chaz was afraid his wife had discovered that he was nothing but big-ticket farmer Red Hammernut’s “biostute,” a State of Florida biological inspector who was faking the results of phosphate testing in order to give Red’s mega-polluting farm a clean bill of health. Now that she’s presumed dead, Joey and Mick Stranahan, the State’s Attorney’s investigator who’s been pensioned off to the middle of nowhere so that he can rescue her, have all the time in the world to figure out why Chaz wanted to get rid of Joey and what naughty games he’s been up to. Their interventions soon escalate from creepy pranks against the grieving widower to a blackmail demand backed up by a faked video of the murder. Meanwhile, Det. Karl Rolvaag, the investigator who’s counting the days till he can leave South Florida and return to frigid Minnesota, develops suspicions of his own about Ricca Spillman, the stylist who’s been solacing Chaz. And Earl Edward O’Toole, the apelike minder Hammernut has hung around Chaz’s neck, begins to move beyond inarticulate resentment at the bullet lodged in his butt-crease when he’s befriended by an elderly cancer patient whose Fentanyl patch he’s swiping. The crew is rounded out by the usual cargo of zanies, with Hiaasen’s signature attention to nonhuman members of the cast.
“I had a feeling he didn’t love me any more,” muses bobbing Joey, “but this is ridiculous.” It’s also bitingly satirical, sublimely zany, and deeply satisfying.Pub Date: July 16, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41108-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
BOOK TO SCREEN
A solid sense of place, a looming sense of menace: a frequently gripping read.
Veste’s moody procedural tells the story of a pair of Liverpool detectives tracking a killer influenced by local mythology.
Louise Henderson, the investigator at the heart of this novel, is a detective with secrets. She keeps some from her partner, DS Shipley; when the book opens, she’s also grappling with moments of sudden and inexplicable terror that leave her unsure of their origin and unsettled by their impact on her. Soon, the detectives take up the case of a woman who escaped a deadly attack—and who believes it was the work of the title character, a local legend who may be a murderer, a supernatural creature, or something else entirely. Not long after that, a dead body shows up, which suggests a connection to an earlier death, but a host of loose ends hang for the detectives to piece together—and there’s also the matter of a series of flashbacks set years earlier, when a teenager vanished. How these seemingly disparate elements connect—sometimes linearly, sometimes via well-made twists—leads the novel to its conclusion. Veste’s slow-burning approach works well, sustaining the sense of general wrongness that gives the narrative so much atmosphere. There are a few heavy-handed moments here and there. “They thought they knew evil. They had no idea” is perhaps the most flagrant example; as this book is either about a serial killer or an urban legend come to life, that sense of menace is already built in to the narrative well enough. But the conclusion is largely satisfying, playing well off the dynamics Veste established over the course of the story.
A solid sense of place, a looming sense of menace: a frequently gripping read.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4926-7129-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fast-paced and fluent, with all the authors’ trademark stratagems. Sure to be a hit, though best read by those with strong...
More Scandinavian psychopathy from the pseudonymous husband-wife team.
Sometimes a boy needs his dad. It being a Shakespearean world, sometimes a boy just needs to kill his dad, even if the paternity is not firmly established—in which instance you can bet on plenty of collateral damage. In Kepler’s newest, the bodies stack up quickly. The first to fall is Sweden’s foreign minister, who is decidedly not a nice guy and has his eyes shot out for his transgressions. That’s not the least icky of the ugly fates visited on the so-called Rabbit Hunter’s victims, as when the killer gazes meaningfully at one of them and “decides that he’s going to cut his legs off and watch him crawl like a snail through his own blood.” Against this gruesome backdrop, only Joona Linna, the ethnically Finnish Swedish supercop, stands a chance of sussing out what’s going on. Trouble is, he’s in the slammer, having been locked away in a maximum security prison for the last two years for his part in events that unfolded in Stalker (2019). It’s only when the prime minister, suspecting that his foreign minister’s death has come at the hands of terrorists, intercedes to make Joona “a highly unorthodox offer” that he can swing back into action with Stockholm cop Saga Bauer and figure out why it is that the trail of blood leads to a TV studio by way of a Chicago psychiatric hospital. As always, along with the many bodies left behind by the “spree killer,” there’s a shoal of red herrings in Kepler’s narrative—human smugglers here, Afghan refugees and the FBI there—and all sorts of ancillary unpleasantries, from rape to evisceration and the chilling thought that when the Rabbit Killer’s victims finally die, various bits of their bodies removed, “the world becomes completely still, like a winter landscape."
Fast-paced and fluent, with all the authors’ trademark stratagems. Sure to be a hit, though best read by those with strong stomachs.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3228-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
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