Another wonderfully adventurous and imaginative novel from the highly praised author of The Waking Spell (1992) and Body of Knowledge (1994). Based on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur and set initially in Dawson's native Texas, this is an extravagant—but engagingly believable—story of 22-year-old Taylor Troys (or, as he prefers, Deeds), a likable layabout who leaves his emotionally overextended family back in small-town Bernice and heads for Dallas to train himself as a cat burglar and track down the absentee father who didn't even stick around for his illegitimate son's birth. Encountering the elusive A.J. Deeds (and having survived hair-raising escapades among the ``Mexican Mafia''), Taylor is thrust into a tangled world of corporate intrigue and more-or-less entrusted with repairing his multimillionaire father's fractured relations with a rival Japanese conglomerate, the Minamoto Group, and embarks on a heroic journey to the Far East that will bring him to a tense, revealing confrontation with the notorious ``demon'' hidden away in a subterranean office. For all the narrative high jinks, Dawson's latest is a thoughtful, probing exploration of the truth that Taylor, in one of his quieter moments, admits to himself: that ``every child in the world ultimately dreams of his parents' perfect union.'' The painfully comic permutations of that truism are explored with ferocious wit in a sprawling narrative that holds in a brilliant balance its winning young hero's comic insouciance and moral backbone. Three terrific novels in five years, no less. It's time to put Dawson's name on the Contemporary Am Lit reading list.
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-56512-126-0
Page Count: 444
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
Connelly takes a break from his Harry Bosch police novels (The Last Coyote, p. 328, etc.) for something even more intense: a reporter's single-minded pursuit of the serial killer who murdered his twin. Even his buddies in the Denver PD thought Sean McEvoy's shooting in the backseat of his car looked like a classic cop suicide, right clown to the motive: his despondency over his failure to clear the murder of a University of Denver student. But as Sean's twin brother, Jack, of the Rocky Mountain News, notices tiny clues that marked Sean's death as murder, his suspicions about the dying message Sean scrawled inside his fogged windshield—"Out of space. Out of time"—alert him to a series of eerily similar killings stretching from Sarasota to Albuquerque. The pattern, Jack realizes, involves two sets of murders: a series of sex killings of children, and then the executions (duly camouflaged as suicides) of the investigating police officers. Armed with what he's dug up, Jack heads off to Washington, to the Law Enforcement Foundation and the FBI. The real fireworks begin as Jack trades his official silence for an inside role in the investigation, only to find himself shut out of both the case and the story. From then on in, Jack, falling hard for Rachel Walling, the FBI agent in charge of the case, rides his Bureau connections like a bucking bronco—even as one William Gladden, a pedophile picked up on a low-level charge in Santa Monica, schemes to make bail before the police can run his prints through the national computer, then waits with sick patience for his chance at his next victim. The long-awaited confrontation between Jack and Gladden comes at an LA video store; but even afterward, Jack's left with devastating questions about the case. Connelly wrings suspense out of every possible aspect of Jack's obsessive hunt for his brother's killer. Prepare to be played like a violin.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-15398-2
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
An effective, uniformly controlled collection of ten stories from the author of, most recently, Cat's Eye (1989). Gathered here are pieces previously appearing in top short- story forums—The New Yorker, Granta, Saturday Night, Playboy—providing an excellent sampling of high-proof Atwood. Virtually all the pieces focus on the lives of women equivocally connected to the men around them. In "Wilderness Tips," a middle-aged woman is bluntly confronted with her husband's infidelity. "Hairball," the most disturbing here, involves the dissolution of a woman's affair with a married man; the otherwise naturalistic posture of the story is powerfully undercut by the presence of a removed tumor that the young lady keeps in a jar, eventually sending it, neatly wrapped, to her lover's wife. In "True Trash," a young woman encounters a youth who is still unaware that he had impregnated a camp employee many years earlier. And "Hack Wednesday" revolves around a disgruntled journalist brought, whimsically, to the brink of an affair before she backs off—not from any pangs of conscience but out of lethargic concern for the work involved in carrying it off. Like Alice Munro, Atwood has a talent for serving up the nuances of bourgeois Ontario culture, but with Atwood the ingredients are boiled down into a stronger and much more acerbic brew. The author's trademark smirk behind the economical prose can be wearying over the course of an entire collection, but taken separately, the pieces here are solid evidence of the author in full form. Pure Atwood.
Pub Date: Dec. 3, 1991
ISBN: 1841957984
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
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