An engaging tale, occasionally thwarted by uninspired prose.
In this thriller, an attorney investigates his father’s murder, which may have been politically motivated.
Will Muñoz, a high-priced lawyer working in San Francisco, gets the tragic news that his mother killed herself. She’d long struggled with persistent melancholy, ever since her husband, famed Chilean novelist Ricardo Muñoz, was murdered 30 years ago in what police said was a burglary gone wrong. However, in her suicide note, she expresses her long-held suspicion that Ricardo was assassinated on the orders of Chilean despot Augusto Pinochet. Ricardo was a relentless critic of Pinochet’s illiberal policies and fled Chile for the United States in 1975, after serving a prison sentence for political dissidence. Then he wrote an unpublished novel dramatizing Pinochet’s lurid personal life—a devastatingly unflattering portrayal that somehow ended up in the dictator’s hands. Will decides to conduct an investigation of his own, finds his father’s manuscript, and commissions a translation of it into English. He also discovers that his mother’s second husband, Chuck Evans, sought out the manuscript as well, had a professional connection to the CIA, and may have participated in a program that experimented on college students with mind-controlling drugs. Will continues to dig deeper and eventually stumbles upon a murderous conspiracy on American soil. Author Robinson (Tropical Judgments, 2015, etc.) conjures a complex skein of diverse plot threads; his novel is part crime drama and part political thriller, as well as a story about Will’s personal torment in dealing with a painful past. The author’s knowledge of Chilean politics in the 1970s, as well as the CIA’s nefarious interventions in it, is impressive, and he artfully weaves this history’s lingering impact into the plot. That said, the prose is a peculiar combination of awkward and banal at times, as in this description of Will’s reaction to his mother’s suicide: “I felt totally and unambiguously vacant. All the processors had shut down. Did you know that suicide is the tenth leading cause of death in the United States?”
An engaging tale, occasionally thwarted by uninspired prose.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-938288-20-3
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Terra Nova
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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