Even though the ending fizzles this time, not even Arthur Bryant’s alarming behavior can dampen the 12th installment in the...
As riots send London into flaming chaos, the Peculiar Crimes Squad fights to solve a series of daily killings that have slipped under everyone else’s radar.
The likely insider trading of Dexter Cornell, a slippery partner in the Findersbury Private Bank, has so incensed Londoners that they’ve taken to the streets and torched buildings. In the midst of it all, a Molotov cocktail that kills a man sleeping on the bank steps brings in the PCU, whose takeover by the City of London has tightened the screws once again (“no more pawning items from the Evidence Room until payday….No selfies at crime scenes”) on its free-wheeling senior detectives, Arthur Bryant and John May. The unit’s ramrod new liaison, Superintendent Darren “Missing” Link, insists that their help be limited to identifying the corpse, but once they’ve tagged him as Freddie Weeks, ironically dubbed “Lucky” by his friends, their involvement rapidly snowballs. Aided by the CCTV cameras that seem to track every furtive movement in the city, they soon realize that this first victim was deliberately targeted by someone who seems determined to add a new corpse to their workload every day, some of the victims linked to the despicable Cornell, all of their ghoulish deaths linked by fire. Even worse, Mr. May sees that Mr. Bryant has been acting even more erratically than usual, no mean feat given Bryant’s flamboyant history (Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart, 2014, etc.). As the calendar ticks down to Guy Fawkes Day, Bryant and May and their junior colleagues race to catch the killer.
Even though the ending fizzles this time, not even Arthur Bryant’s alarming behavior can dampen the 12th installment in the most joyously inventive mystery series of our time.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-54768-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Not his best, but a spooky pleasure for King’s boundless legion of fans.
Horrormeister King (End of Watch, 2016, etc.) serves up a juicy tale that plays at the forefront of our current phobias, setting a police procedural among the creepiest depths of the supernatural.
If you’re a little squeamish about worms, you’re really not going to like them after accompanying King through his latest bit of mayhem. Early on, Ralph Anderson, a detective in the leafy Midwestern burg of Flint City, is forced to take on the unpleasant task of busting Terry Maitland, a popular teacher and Little League coach and solid citizen, after evidence links him to the most unpleasant violation and then murder of a young boy: “His throat was just gone,” says the man who found the body. “Nothing there but a red hole. His bluejeans and underpants were pulled down to his ankles, and I saw something….” Maitland protests his innocence, even as DNA points the way toward an open-and-shut case, all the way up to the point where he leaves the stage—and it doesn’t help Anderson’s world-weariness when the evil doesn’t stop once Terry’s in the ground. Natch, there’s a malevolent presence abroad, one that, after taking a few hundred pages to ferret out, will remind readers of King’s early novel It. Snakes, guns, metempsychosis, gangbangers, possessed cops, side tours to jerkwater Texas towns, all figure in King’s concoction, a bloodily Dantean denunciation of pedophilia. King skillfully works in references to current events (Black Lives Matter) and long-standing memes (getting plowed into by a runaway car), and he’s at his best, as always, when he’s painting a portrait worthy of Brueghel of the ordinary gone awry: “June Gibson happened to be the woman who had made the lasagna Arlene Peterson dumped over her head before suffering her heart attack.” Indeed, but overturned lasagna pales in messiness compared to when the evil entity’s head caves in “as if it had been made of papier-mâché rather than bone.” And then there are those worms. Yuck.
Not his best, but a spooky pleasure for King’s boundless legion of fans.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8098-9
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The setup is so patient and the logistics so matter-of-fact that even the savviest readers will be caught in the story’s...
The FBI hires an aging child actor to go undercover in a West Virginia prison to extract vital information from a convicted money launderer who’d rather keep his head down.
Tommy Jump’s best days onstage are probably behind him. At 27, he’s too old to play children or even teenagers. But as his old schoolmate Danny Ruiz, who’s now with the FBI, assures him, he’s not too old to earn a fat paycheck by playing the role of Peter Lenfest Goodrich, the high school history teacher who reacted to a bank’s plans to foreclose on his mortgage by robbing the bank and then getting caught. Danny is convinced that Tommy’s just the person to worm himself into the confidence of Mitchell Dupree, whose job as an executive in the Latin American division at Union South Bank was seriously compromised when he laundered millions for El Vio, the fearsome, half-blind boss of the New Colima Cartel. Mitch has a wife and two children just beginning the long wait outside for him to serve his time, and although he’s arranged for the documentary evidence he assembled against El Vio to be turned over to the authorities if anything untoward happens to him, he’s not about to upset the apple cart by talking out of turn—unless of course it’s to innocuous Pete Goodrich, who’ll be serving time alongside him in the minimum security Morgantown Prison as soon as he pleads guilty and bids a tearful farewell to Amanda Porter, Tommy’s actual fiancee, who’s just found out she’s pregnant. After all, Tommy’s been acting professionally for most of his life, and the FBI will spring him on a moment’s notice if he gets into trouble, so what could possibly go wrong? Fans of Parks’ well-oiled thrillers (Closer than You Know, 2018, etc.) won’t even bother to ask; they’ll be too busy licking their chops anticipating the twists that are bound to come.
The setup is so patient and the logistics so matter-of-fact that even the savviest readers will be caught in the story’s expertly laid traps before they know what’s happening.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4353-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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