Nazis, noir, and a soupçon of boudoir combine to make this a memorable thriller.
In Trolson’s (A Passing Curse, 2012) new crime novel, a damaged, dangerous, and relentlessly drinking West Coast cop needs to find answers after heads literally start to roll—with his name carved into them.
It’s the 1990s, and if Southern California–based homicide detective Jack Wainwright isn’t drinking, he isn’t awake. Excessive imbibing, however, doesn’t hamper him from easily bedding women roughly half his age. He lives in his inherited “Moorish castle knock-off” that he shares with his septuagenarian uncle, Max, who’s said to have had ties to Adolf Hitler. In the ’60s, Jack served in Vietnam as part of Team Viking, a group of soldier-assassins that tested stamina-enhancing drugs under the supervision of psychiatrist Lucius King. Now, two dismembered former Team Viking members have just been unearthed on Jack’s neighbor’s property, with the name “Charon” carved into their foreheads—Jack’s code name when he was in Vietnam. Also found was a rare, gold swastika pin, which Jack believes belongs to Max. Jack seeks King’s help in solving the recent murders, but he keeps suspicions regarding his uncle a secret. After more members of Team Viking are found murdered, Jack, Max, and King head to Zurich to retrieve King’s hidden memoirs, written long ago, which the psychiatrist says should reveal who wanted the former soldiers dead. Hard-edged dialogue is typical for this book. Before the trio leave for Switzerland, for instance, Jack’s housekeeper warns him, “The doctor is trouble and that old man your uncle is not stable. You watch them.” Later, Jack also hooks up with a girl in a jazz club; she thinks that Jack’s home state of California is near Florida: “No. It’s on the other side of the country,” he says, continuing, “Florida’s like a redneck California.” Trolson also offers vivid descriptions: “[He] finished the heel from a half-pint of Popov vodka, drinking it hot and straight and whistling when he was done.” The plot is absorbing and complicated—for example, when it starts, King is a confessed, institutionalized serial killer—and this results in quickly turned pages.
Nazis, noir, and a soupçon of boudoir combine to make this a memorable thriller.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 315
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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