Despite some pivotal plot twists that are more emotionally wrenching than plausible, the novel is a remarkably assured...
In this debut novel from screenwriter Levien, a kidnapped child leads an emotionally wounded private detective and his client down a relentlessly grim trail from middle America to the darkest deserts of Mexico.
Young Jamie Gabriel is in the middle of his predawn paper route when he’s snatched from an Indianapolis street by strip-club bouncer Tad Ford and his partner Rooster Mintz. Fourteen months pass before his parents, Paul and Carol, paying yet another hopeless visit to the police station, realize that Captain James Pomeroy, who assured them that their son ran away, has assigned some 20 officer-hours to the case, less than two hours per month. So the time is ripe for them to follow up a tip from a sympathetic cop and hire private investigator Frank Behr, an ex-cop whose career took a nosedive when he ran afoul of Pomeroy and his own son was accidentally killed. It’s not long before Behr gets results by turning up leads the cops should have unearthed within days, and not long after that before Paul talks Behr into letting him ride along on his interrogations. Identifying the two experienced abductors, one of whom specializes in breaking down the defenses of young victims to help make them compliant enough for the sex trade, leads to a series of frustrating dead ends even as it alerts Tad and Rooster’s paymaster that someone’s on his trail. A long night’s worth of obligatory scenes—a pair of replacement goons wait outside a restaurant where Behr’s enjoying a rare date as Paul, left on his own, decides to break into the paymaster’s house looking for evidence—leads to a confrontation so shattering that the inevitable Mexican postlude is almost anticlimactic.
Despite some pivotal plot twists that are more emotionally wrenching than plausible, the novel is a remarkably assured exercise in grabbing you by the throat and shaking you until the very end.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52366-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are...
A perfect wife’s disappearance plunges her husband into a nightmare as it rips open ugly secrets about his marriage and, just maybe, his culpability in her death.
Even after they lost their jobs as magazine writers and he uprooted her from New York and spirited her off to his childhood home in North Carthage, Mo., where his ailing parents suddenly needed him at their side, Nick Dunne still acted as if everything were fine between him and his wife, Amy. His sister Margo, who’d gone partners with him on a local bar, never suspected that the marriage was fraying, and certainly never knew that Nick, who’d buried his mother and largely ducked his responsibilities to his father, stricken with Alzheimer’s, had taken one of his graduate students as a mistress. That’s because Nick and Amy were both so good at playing Mr. and Ms. Right for their audience. But that all changes the morning of their fifth anniversary when Amy vanishes with every indication of foul play. Partly because the evidence against him looks so bleak, partly because he’s so bad at communicating grief, partly because he doesn’t feel all that grief-stricken to begin with, the tide begins to turn against Nick. Neighbors who’d been eager to join the police in the search for Amy begin to gossip about him. Female talk-show hosts inveigh against him. The questions from Detective Rhonda Boney and Detective Jim Gilpin get sharper and sharper. Even Nick has to acknowledge that he hasn’t come close to being the husband he liked to think he was. But does that mean he deserves to get tagged as his wife’s killer? Interspersing the mystery of Amy’s disappearance with flashbacks from her diary, Flynn (Dark Places, 2009, etc.) shows the marriage lumbering toward collapse—and prepares the first of several foreseeable but highly effective twists.
One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are chilling.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-58836-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Schneider’s debut enlivens the police procedural with offbeat characters and an appealingly complex hero.
Hollywood detectives catch the strange case of a brutally burned body.
Detective Tully Jarsdel is a former academic, leading his partner, Morales, to call him Professor. When he fights his way through multiple news crews to reach a corpse one day, it's unlike any he’s ever seen. The body is twisted, partially ravaged, and burned so badly it’s unrecognizable. Jarsdel and Morales intensely question Dustin Sparks, the horror-movie special-effects expert who found the body. He eventually admits that he saw the body being dumped from a van, but his addiction to OxyContin makes him a compromised witness. While waiting for DNA results, Jarsdel and Morales watch missing persons reports closely. An odd red disk glued to the victim’s palm turns out to be a 1996 quarter painted red: the case’s first clue, albeit a murky one. DNA connects the victim to grizzled convict Lawrence Wolin, who identifies the man as his brother. The pieces of Grant Wolin’s life come together via interviews prompted by a search of his dirty apartment. He sold jars of “genuine Hollywood dirt” on the street, smoked marijuana occasionally, and was apparently asexual. A dinner scene at the home of Jarsdel’s scholarly parents provides insight into his psyche and his sense of isolation. Though he fits in with neither the gritty world of police work nor the ivory tower of academia, he has a passion for justice.
Schneider’s debut enlivens the police procedural with offbeat characters and an appealingly complex hero.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4926-8444-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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