A soft-boiled detective yarn.
Adam Zantz, a 37-year-old Jewish Lyft driver earning his P.I. certification, is summoned by an old family friend to solve a decades-old mystery.
Charles Elkaim is dying and wants closure. Forty years ago, his son Emil (“the Israeli Keith Richards”) was arrested for the murder of Reynaldo Durazo (“the Mexican Keith Moon”), then shivved in prison while awaiting trial. Charles is convinced Emil was framed, as is reinforced by a recent visit from Devon Hawley, a man who claims he can prove Emil’s innocence. Adam, Charles’ old piano student, remembers a young Emil “strumming Beatles on a scratched-up acoustic,” and spurred by both Jewish guilt and a desire not to be seen as “the king of jumping ship,” agrees to investigate. He learns that Emil, Reynaldo, and Devon all played in The Daily Telegraph, a band that was either the next big thing or “some nothing rock band,” depending on who’s asked. After discovering an old Telegraph record—whose transcribed lyrics are scattered over many chapters—Adam is drawn into a web of psychedelia and “the dream.” Weizmann is conversant in the vocabulary of detective fiction, counterculture, and Judaism, but his descriptions feel superficial. Yiddishisms like noodnik and schmuck are peppered throughout, and characters ask questions like: “Mind if I make like Bob Marley and light a fire?” Noir, even when its plot isn’t watertight, largely lives and breathes on evocative settings and idiosyncratic characters. Unfortunately, Adam’s narration is inconsistent, characters traffic in exposition and cliches—and occasionally negative stereotypes about homelessness and mental health—and the L.A. landscape is scarcely sketched, particularly egregious considering that Adam drives around for a living. Convoluted mysteries aren’t an automatic impediment to success (see Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice), but absent stronger craft elements, this one lacks intrigue.
A soft-boiled detective yarn.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781685891152
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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