A credible American debut. Let’s hope it inspires someone Over Here to publish Brookmyre’s earlier fiction.
Scottish writer Brookmyre's fifth comic thriller is his first to be published here, no doubt thanks to its ultra-American setting and storylines.
An oceanographic vessel is discovered floating somewhere in the Pacific, its crew vanished. A carnival of far-right Christians has parked itself outside the hotel hosting a convention of exploitation filmmakers whom LAPD Sergeant Larry Freeman, back from leave after the death of a child, is supposed to protect. Add to this mix an ex-porn star (child of a prominent conservative US senator) and a 6-foot 7-inch Glasgow photographer on his first visit to the City of Angels, stir well with bombs and an apocalyptic plot that threatens the entire city as the clock ticks toward the fateful date of December 31, 1999. Or, to be more succinct, imagine Day of the Locust updated and rewritten by Carl Hiaasen. Well regarded in the UK for his previous work, Brookmyre here attempts something truly ambitious: an amusing suspenser with a serious message about religious intolerance. To some extent, he succeeds. The initial interweaving of more than a half-dozen plot threads is occasionally exasperating (you’re repeatedly wrenched away in the middle of interesting developments), but the payoff in the middle section, where the major elements finally come together with a literal bang, is considerable and quite satisfying. The final third, with its race-against-time finale, is also good solid fun. Brookmyre, though, takes too many lengthy digressions into the screwed-up pasts of his characters (all except Freeman victims of some sex-related trauma) and long diatribes about the multiple sins of religious fundamentalism. Also, despite some valiant efforts to delay the multiple payoffs, the actual working-out of the narrative is fairly predictable. Still, the good guys are eminently likable and the bad guys surprisingly sincere.
A credible American debut. Let’s hope it inspires someone Over Here to publish Brookmyre’s earlier fiction.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-787-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
