More painful than funny.
A few twists and turns fail to lift this unimaginative novel out of boredom and turgidity.
A predictable assortment of lowlifes inhabits the book. The narrator is Benny Bunt, the “snitch” of the title, a denizen of the Greasy Tuesday, a dive housing a collection of other lowlifes. Benny is a fount of arcane and useless information, mainly owing to his having memorized all the cards from Trivial Pursuit (which edition is uncertain). Because his marriage to Donna has become a “loveless cage,” he finds social (certainly not intellectual or sexual) fulfillment at the Tuesday. There he comes under the spell of Gus “Mad Dog” Miller, nominally a Vietnam vet and self-described badass. What brings them together as metaphorical brothers is “nothing more complicated than [Gus’s] desire to tell stories and my desire to hear them.” Problem is, Gus is both more and less complicated than he seems. After getting Benny deeply involved in a bizarre hit scheme—with appropriate but predictable allusions to The Sopranos—Gus is eventually revealed to be Gerry Finkel, a drifter and Vietnam vet manqué, who had taken over Gus’s identity in a distorted admiration to be someone who’d actually had some Real Life Experiences. To his credit, Benny retrospectively realizes that if someone says “a thing with enough fire and conviction [and adds] a few fistfuls of Svengali charisma…just about anything sounds true.” Benny bewilderingly finds himself accused of a double murder, and Walter Goins, his public defender who wears Looney Tunes and Three Stooges ties, doesn’t inspire confidence. Goffard mixes up narrative structures by including “transcripts” from Benny’s trial and a sensationalized account called Murder on the Edge!, the result of a prison interview Benny gave. This is the kind of novel with dialogue like “You’ve really lived life. I love your tats, man. You’ve done time?”
More painful than funny.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-58567-954-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Rookery/Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Griffiths, who is known for the Magic Men mysteries and the Ruth Galloway series, has written her first stand-alone novel...
A secondary school English department in West Sussex is turned upside down by a series of bookish killings.
Clare Cassidy is heading into middle age with just her teenage daughter, her faithful dog, her diary, and her teaching job to occupy her time. The most exciting part of her life may be the biography she hopes to write of R.M. Holland, a writer of gothic tales who once lived in the school where she works. But when one of her colleagues in the English department at Talgarth High is found murdered with a line from "The Stranger," the very same Holland story that has long obsessed Clare, left on a Post-it next to her body, she quickly realizes the murderer must be someone who knows an awful lot about her. This suspicion is confirmed when, the day before Halloween, Clare discovers that someone else has left her a note in her own diary. As the violence escalates, Clare and the police must figure out why the killer seems so fixated on Clare—and what a supernaturally tinged tale more than a hundred years old has to do with the quiet lives of small-town Brits. Griffiths alternates points of view among Clare, her 15-year-old daughter, Georgie, and DS Harbinder Kaur, the queer policewoman in charge of the murder investigation. Thrown into the mix are excerpts from "The Stranger," itself a delicious homage to writers like M.R. James. Though all these ingredients occasionally cause some structural unwieldiness, Griffiths (The Vanishing Box, 2018, etc.) hits a sweet spot for readers who love British mysteries and who are looking for something to satisfy an itch once Broadchurch has been binged and Wilkie Collins reread.
Griffiths, who is known for the Magic Men mysteries and the Ruth Galloway series, has written her first stand-alone novel with immensely pleasurable results.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-57785-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
Earnest, heavier than usual on old-fashioned detective work, and ritualistic to a fault. If you’re surprised by anything...
Marshal Virgil Cole and Deputy Marshall Everett Hitch face what amounts to an underground range war in Appaloosa.
The minute rancher James McCormick found gold on the parcel of land he’d purchased from Henri Baptiste, Baptiste rued the sale and tried everything he could to persuade McCormick and his brother, Daniel, to sell it back. The measures the Baptiste Group took included hiring seven gunslingers headed by fearsome Victor Bartholomew to intimidate the McCormicks and their miners, two of whom have now vanished. Nothing daunted, the McCormicks have engaged Edward Hodge and some gunmen of their own. As each side swaggers and threatens and waits for the other to back down, tensions rise across the town’s 4,000 souls. But dressmaker Allie French, Cole’s sweetie, still keeps her sights fixed firmly on Appaloosa Days, the celebration of local culture she’s enticed visiting actress/singer Martha Kathryn to join. Since sparks have instantly flown between Martha and Hitch, the lawmen have an even greater stake than usual in keeping the peace. But that promises to be harder than they know. An unnamed kid has broken out of jail, traced his roots to Appaloosa, and set his course for the troubled town, apparently robbing and killing everyone in his path except for a teamster’s wife whose Amazonian figure makes her even more intimidating than him. In short order, she takes him to bed, stokes the fires of his quest for vengeance, and tags along to provide logistical support. Cole and Hitch, who’ve now appeared in more novels written by Knott (Robert B. Parker’s Revelation, 2017, etc.) than by their creator, have little to do but stand around, tote up the rising body count and occasionally augment it, and offer gruffly monosyllabic responses to questions that come their way as the perfect storm gathers to strike their hometown.
Earnest, heavier than usual on old-fashioned detective work, and ritualistic to a fault. If you’re surprised by anything that happens, you need to read more Westerns.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1827-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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