An imposing, unforgettable modern take on the classic detective story.
In Musial’s debut thriller, a former Army Ranger working at a pool hall turns detective when he becomes a person of interest in a murder investigation.
Max Deacon is just a guy earning his keep at Dougie’s Pool Hall in Chicago. But his scuffle with a few goons impresses Luna Del Playa so much that she asks for his help. Apparently, Luna and her gal pals at Mellon’s Bar and Grill are being sexually harassed by their boss. Max stops by the restaurant and roughs up Marky Sanchez, but a few weeks later, Marky gets a bullet in the head and another in the chest. Cops take an immediate interest in Max, who goes about trying to clear his name. He can’t decide between suspects Praxibus Sanchez (Marky’s gangster father) and Hector, a bookie to whom Marky owed a hefty debt. It seems Max is on the right track when someone shows up at his apartment to kill him. Now Max needs all the support he can get, and luckily he’s got boss Dougie, Army buddy Moose, and cop brother Stan on his side. Author Musial deftly complements the contemporary setting with a traditional detective story: a night owl who often works the late shift, Max smells like cigarettes from the pool room (even though it’s illegal to smoke in there), and his dark past, which includes time in Iraq, leads to PTSD and recurring nightmares. Max’s friends and colleagues are a winsome, motley bunch, even Dougie’s day-shift employee Wally, who speaks broken English with a thick Polish accent. The ladies are unfortunately not as engaging; they’re predominantly eye candy for the men. Max starts a (mostly physical) relationship with Mellon’s bartender Gwen, but she’s interchangeable with any of the other female characters, from Luna to Max’s co-worker Sharon. Musial, however, loads his story with shocking moments, including a torture scene that redefines the word pincushion. There’s also tough-guy dialogue with a delicate sprinkling of humor: a beaten and bloody Max blames his condition on a door-to-door salesman—“gave me the hard sell on a set of steak knives.” This could conceivably—and hopefully—be the first in a series to feature the unseasoned but capable gumshoe.
An imposing, unforgettable modern take on the classic detective story.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2015
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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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