Suspense is secondary here, but the story still works.
A Prohibition Era gambler tries to pay off his debts by tracking down money in an unlikely setting—the off-season outpost of a traveling carnival.
Wimberley (King of Colored Town, 2007, etc.) returns to mysteries with hero Jack Romaine, a handsome Cincinnati widower with an addiction to risky behavior who has found himself deeply in debt to gangster Oliver Bladehorn. Bladehorn promises to forgive the debts if Jack can uncover his stolen fortune, but he raises the stakes by threatening the safety of Jack’s mother-in-law and young son. The situation is further complicated by a deranged thug named Arno Becker who is also after the money. A hot lead sends Jack by train to Northern Florida (familiar territory for Wimberley) to look for a man named Alex Goodman who was supposedly living at Kaleidoscope, an off-season camp of carnies run by the beautiful, blue-skinned Luna Chevreaux. Jack learns quickly that Alex is dead, but something is still off about the camp—and particularly about Princess Peewee, a 600-pound woman who was said to be Alex’s lover, and who is immediately suspicious of Jack’s presence. Others warm to him, particularly Luna and a pair of married dwarves, and though he initially stands out in a world literally made up of circus freaks, by the time Becker picks up his trail, Jack realizes that he has essentially found a new family at Kaleidoscope. Time is running out, so Jack risks his budding relationship with Luna to dig further into the camp’s secrets to get answers about the missing fortune. While the final twist isn’t obvious, it also is not nearly as remarkable as the genuine warmth the author uses to conjure an alienated but loving community of outcasts.
Suspense is secondary here, but the story still works.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59264-244-1
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Toby Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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