Total eclipse of the heart.
Fourth and last in this British author’s experimental Red Riding Quartet crime epic: a raw and furious wade through the Valley of Death that understates its big sweet hell of pages chock-a-block with violated corpses and red rain running with blood.
Peace’s Boschian landscape of West Yorkshire’s all-out dystopia began with Nineteen Seventy Four (2000) and a young girl’s murdered body, found in a ditch with swan’s wings sewn to its shoulder blades. While atmospheric with ’70s music and ads, that first installment set the quartet’s bleak Orwellian tone, though with echoes of the complex modes of Dos Passos’s U.S.A. and the demonic grimness, violence, corruption and conspiracies of James Ellroy. But as Nineteen Seventy Seven (2001) shows, Peace’s obscene vision of cut-up bodies, castration, girls scalped and strangled, is all his own, with memorial images of swan’s wings floating through all four novels. Peace’s Yorkshire Ripper, who disembodies prostitutes with a screwdriver, is taken from real life (as in Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia and as with nearly all of Peace’s crimes), and family members of the dead have to live with Peace’s fear-reminding, gore-riddled pages. Nineteen Eighty (2001) finds the Ripper still abroad but with Yorkshire undergoing vast social change and the police corruption and true-fact crimes adding unusual depth to the series’ black nightmare. Now, Peace brings back a handful of earlier characters to help work up the reader’s revulsion and nausea. Corrupt Detective Chief Superintendent Maurice Jobson, owl-like with thick lenses in black frames, is tracking the kidnapping and probable murder of ten-year-old Hazel Atkins, but his mind still swims with memories of Clare Kemplay, she with the swan’s wings, now murdered a decade ago. Also on hand is lawyer Big John Piggott, who no longer believes that retarded Michael Myshkin, whose forced confession has him serving time for Clare’s murder, actually did it. And on the run is thief and sexual rent boy BJ.
Total eclipse of the heart.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-85242-684-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
You can’t help but chuckle over all the disasters, but in the end the heroine catches her prey.
An Arizona accountant with a penchant for solving murders lands a fishy case.
Sophie "Phee" Kimball might lead a dull life if it weren’t for her mother, Harriet Plunkett, and Harriet’s neurotic Chiweenie, Streetman. As it is, Harriet lives near her daughter in Sun City West and has a wide circle of zany friends who’ve helped Phee solve several mysteries (Molded 4 Murder, 2019, etc.) while she’s been working for Williams Investigations along with her boyfriend, Marshall, a former police officer. While Phee’s visiting Harriet one day, Streetman dashes over to the neighbors’ barbecue grill and unearths a dead body under a tarp. As usual, the overwhelmed local police ask Williams Investigations to help—er, consult. Harriet’s main concern is getting costumes made for the reluctant Streetman, whom she’s entered in a series of contests starting with Halloween and progressing through Thanksgiving, Christmas/Hannukah, and St. Patrick’s Day. One of her friends is an accomplished seamstress who goes all out making gorgeous costumes that will beat an obnoxious lady who looks down on mutts. The dead man is identified as Cameron Tully, a seafood distributor, who was poisoned by the locally ubiquitous sago pine. At the first dog contest, Elaine Meschow has to be rushed to the hospital after she gets a dose of the same thing. The owner of a gourmet dog food company, Elaine is lucky enough to recover. After Streetman takes second place, Harriet’s team redoubles its efforts for the next contest while Phee and Marshall, who are moving into a new place together, continue to hunt for clues. A restaurant holdup and a scheme to use empty houses for hookups for high school kids add to the confusion.
You can’t help but chuckle over all the disasters, but in the end the heroine catches her prey.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2455-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on...
After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that’s as dark as any of Patrick’s cases.
Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean’s parents’ house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy’s friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it’s Jimmy’s turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he’s got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who’s done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend’s official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave’s wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else’s blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it’s easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all.
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters’ heads.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-16316-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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