A one-of-a-kind sport that’s too torrid to satisfy as a thriller and too cockamamie to be erotic.
Uruguayan novelist and classics professor Chavarría turns from his scholarly studies of the origins of prostitution to a contemporary lab in his translation-into-English debut, the cat-and-mouse tale of a bicycle whore in post-Soviet Havana.
If there’s one thing Alicia wants, it’s not to be poor. So when Gorbachev turns a cold shoulder on his North American comrades, putting an end to her studies at the university, she makes a careful assessment of her assets—golden-blond hair, perky breasts, irresistible behind—then puts them on careful display on a secondhand bike. Her lovingly detailed technique is so foolproof that soon the house that she shares with her mother, Margarita, is filled to bursting with gifts from her new friends (the two ladies are too proud and independent to accept cash). Alicia, in fact, never takes money with her and never eats anywhere but home—until she meets Victor King, trade representative for a firm of Dutch treasure hunters who talks like Pancho Villa and looks like Mel Gibson. He’s so handsome that Alicia agrees to have dinner at his elegantly furnished home, where she and he have every kind of sex Chavarría hasn’t already catalogued. Alicia thinks she’s got it made; she’ll become mistress to this gorgeous hunk and never have to pedal the streets of Havana again—except that King wants her not for himself but for his wife, Elizabeth, who can only become aroused when she watches others. So Alicia agrees to put on well-paid shows for Victor and Elizabeth, copulating enthusiastically with a variety of men and the occasional knickknack—until King ups the ante once again, involving her in a kidnap plot that will either make her rich or ruin her.
A one-of-a-kind sport that’s too torrid to satisfy as a thriller and too cockamamie to be erotic.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-888451-16-5
Page Count: 245
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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
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