A suave murder mystery and flawless noir landscape—another solid entry in the Bartley canon.
The fourth novel in Bartley’s (For a Sin Offering, 2013, etc.) series featuring Bible-toting Ross Duncan follows him as he looks into murders connected to a bank job.
Duncan, on trial for murder, escapes an Indiana jail and heads back to Chicago. But his cavalier exit comes with a price: He must return the favor to the Chicago Outfit and help knock over a bank. During the robbery, an employee is killed by one of Duncan’s assigned partners from New York—a murder that seems too calculated to be unintended. Later, there’s an ambush, and another murder links Duncan to the bank job, leading to them looking for answers and payback in New York. Bartley’s protagonist, in prior books, had been personally invested in acts of vengeance, often spurred by guilt over someone’s death. But there isn’t such an intimate relation this time around; it’s the second murder (of a person he’s encountered for merely a few minutes) that provokes his need for retribution. The story, however, remains dramatically involving. Duncan acts as a conduit of justice, in this case for Tony Accardo, a Chicago gangster whose letter—the details of which are never fully revealed—so strongly affects Duncan that he refuses to stop until he’s found the killers, rereading the letter along the way. And though there are fewer references to his Bible, Duncan is still prone to quoting Scripture, and his position that seems to be one of moral obligation makes him a convincing lead character. The author keeps the series fresh by spotlighting the mystery: Who ordered the killings and where are the New York thugs from the robbery? There are even more intriguing questions after Duncan learns about the two murder victims. Bartley’s also consistent: There’s a witty reminder of Duncan’s bank-robbing profession as he cheerily hums “Skip to My Lou” while robbing another bank, and Duncan’s lady friend, Delilah, is her typical envious self (she’s even jealous of his dead girlfriend). Elsewhere, the largely uninitiated Eva, Delilah’s sister, is so shaken by an early morning escape from the cops that it gives her nightmares. An explosive ending and an uncaught, enigmatic killer guarantee more promising books in the series.
A suave murder mystery and flawless noir landscape—another solid entry in the Bartley canon.Pub Date: May 29, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Peach Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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