Colorful, engaging, and bloody; a richly satisfying crime story and character study.
A sticky yarn of paranoia and semiorganized crime, ready for the multiplex.
The real-life burglary of Chicago mob boss Tony Accardo’s suburban home in 1978 provides a marvelously hooky backdrop for Hogan’s lowdown tale, which fictionalizes the event and the subsequent assassinations of parties directly and tangentially involved with the incident. “Nicky Pins” Passero, a bowling alley proprietor and midlevel member of Accardo’s outfit, is our point-of-view character and an ideal guide through the horrific events set in motion by the resentful thief and the increasingly paranoid Accardo. Nicky, a closeted gay family man adrift after separating from his wife, is intelligent, sensitive, and discreet, operating under the radar as an effective survival strategy. Ironically, his superb people skills win him the confidence of Accardo, which first feels like an honor but quickly devolves into a bloody nightmare as the crime lord tasks him with catching the thieves who invaded his home. Further complicating matters is Nicky’s status as an FBI informant dominated and abused by his handler, who entrapped Nicky via a humiliating staged seduction scenario. Hogan expertly tightens the screws as Nicky desperately scrambles to please his superiors, underlings, handlers, and estranged family as the body count mounts in increasingly gruesome fashion. Nicky is a fascinating character, sympathetic yet complicated, an aware and articulate person who has drifted into hell incrementally, trying in his way to do the right thing when he can. The satisfying thriller structure, vivid dialogue and characterizations, and tragicomic tone are reminiscent of the Coen brothers’ best film work, and the historical underpinning provides the pleasures of a first-rate true-crime tale.
Colorful, engaging, and bloody; a richly satisfying crime story and character study.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5387-5175-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.
The ne’er-do-well son of a successful Irish American family gets dragged into criminal complications that suggest the rest of the Devlins aren’t exactly the upstanding citizens they appear.
The first 35 years in the life of Thomas “TJ” Devlin have been one disappointment after another to his parents, lawyers who founded a prosperous insurance and reinsurance firm, and his more successful siblings, John and Gabby. A longtime alcoholic who’s been unemployable ever since he did time for an incident involving his ex-girlfriend Carrie’s then 2-year-old daughter, TJ is nominally an investigator for Devlin & Devlin, but everyone knows the post is a sinecure. Things change dramatically when golden-boy John tells TJ that he just killed Neil Lemaire, an accountant for D&D client Runstan Electronics. Their speedy return to the murder scene reveals no corpse, so the brothers breathe easier—until Lemaire turns up shot to death in his car. John’s way of avoiding anything that might jeopardize his status as heir apparent to D&D is to throw TJ under the bus, blaming him for everything John himself has done and adding that you can’t trust anything his brother has said since he’s fallen off the wagon. TJ, who’s maintained his sobriety a day at a time for nearly two years, feels outraged, but neither the police investigating the murder nor his nearest and dearest care about his feelings. Forget the forgettable mystery, whose solution will leave you shrugging instead of gasping, and focus on the circular firing squad of the Devlins, and you’ll have a much better time than TJ.
As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780525539704
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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