A thrilling tale loaded with bullets, bloodshed, and bodies that stars a daring veteran.
A bored cabbie tempts fate by attaching himself to a gunslinging gangster and his female operative.
Prolific British writer Dash’s (Midsummer’s Bottom, 2018, etc.) latest novel stars Eyrie Brown, a hard-drinking London taxi driver who, while lamenting his dull life, witnesses a shootout between several East End gangsters. One of the bloodied gunmen, Lewis Brue, rushes out of an alley and accepts the cabbie’s swift offer of a ride. Brue counters with an offer of his own to have Brown work covertly for him. As a former British soldier who returned from his enlistment “directionless and penniless,” Brown, abandoning his hopes to become a pro boxer, accepts Brue’s lucrative “business” proposition to do a job for 25,000 pounds. The author deftly paints his protagonist as hardscrabble and desperate for meaning in his life, but also possibly suffering from PTSD as he becomes increasingly reckless. The job appears innocent enough at first, but there’s a catch: “babysit” a young woman named Toni Curtis for a weekend, but “fight or flee” if armed henchmen arrive at his apartment looking for her. It quickly becomes clear to Brown that lewd, cocky Toni isn’t just an average woman needing special protection. Though he employs the kind of physical and tactical talent that kept him alive throughout his stint in the military, he proves no match for the cunning, gun- and knife-toting Toni after he carelessly takes her to a bare-knuckles boxing match and then a bar where trouble boils over, leaving three patrons dead. Panicked relocations only lead to more chaos and Toni’s kidnapping as Brown attempts to return the money and bow out but ends up being the one in the mob’s crosshairs. In this page-turning tale, Dash supplies plenty of rousing action and deadly gangster machinations to satisfy mob-flavored fiction fans. But it’s his knack for creating classic scene-stealing villains with names like Smurf, Spursy, and Rabbit that really deserves the applause. The author is also careful not to let things peter out as his bold protagonist finds a new lease on life. The rousing story’s rescue mission conclusion is as bloody and cinematic as its opening scenes.
A thrilling tale loaded with bullets, bloodshed, and bodies that stars a daring veteran.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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