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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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