An enjoyable Chicago detective story starring an eight-ball-playing protagonist.
Musial (Break Shot, 2015) returns with another Max Deacon mystery in this novel of crime and pool.
Max works in a Chicago pool hall. The job isn’t glamorous and the clientele is a bit rough, but it allows him plenty of time to practice the game he loves. Max is preparing to enter an eight-ball tournament offering a cash prize and a spot on the national tour when the pool hall becomes the target of an unexpected series of attacks. Someone hurls a brick through the window, followed by a Molotov cocktail. Later, the owner, Dougie, is badly beaten and left to die in the doorway. With his boss in a coma, Max tries to get a grasp of the situation: “Either Dougie or the pool hall, or someone connected to it, was being targeted. I wanted to find out why.” His only clue is the name of Dougie’s girlfriend, Aaliyah, a woman whom everybody seems to know about except for Max. She’s got connections to a drug dealer on the South Side. Though Max is an Army veteran who knows how to handle himself in a fight, he’s cautioned not to be careless in his personal investigation of the case. Max will do anything for a friend, but as the attacks increase in severity, the situation may prove too much for even a shark like him to shoot his way out of. Max certainly fits the genre archetype, though his modern-day greaser ethos—the pool, the Mustang, the occasional Camel cigarette—and the sleazy Chicago setting provide just enough color to give him a distinctive, lived-in quality. His narrative voice strikes a nice balance between irreverence and world-weary sincerity, and Musial exercises restraint in keeping the dialogue more or less believable. The story is small but well-paced and compelling, and while readers end up right where they expect to, fans of the genre will likely relish this iteration. The world of pool (and the city of Chicago) may be one of the last areas of contemporary society where noirish tropes can be sustained without feeling contrived; Max probably has many adventures ahead of him.
An enjoyable Chicago detective story starring an eight-ball-playing protagonist.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: July 24, 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
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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