Works by Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen offer more hyperbole and surrealism, respectively. Still, there's plenty of good fun...
A universal fantasy kicks off Hart’s debut comic caper.
Jason Najarian, pencil pusher for a Boston rope company, wins a multimillion dollar lottery. Jason quits the job, buys his divorced parents each a house, disengages from newfound friends and relatives, and plots revenge on his unfaithful ex-wife, who pleads "[t]emporary insanity....My periods were wicked bad back then." Jason gives her $10,000, moves to a beachfront mansion on a Florida island and tells her to join him in Malibu, Calif. Hart’s Everyman fantasy plays out with a madcap cast, including "The Hammer," Phyllis Hammerstein, pint-sized realtor. She’s cool until Jason lays down a $1.2 million certified check, and then she turns flirty. The bad-guy lead is amply filled by 380-pound, 5-foot-10 Salvatore "Two Scales" Scalise, a hit man in hiding after accidentally adding the mob capo’s son to a contract. The romantic lead goes to Fiona "Running Bush" Tallahassee, Native American activist, who Jason believes is "the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, without first logging onto a website." There’s woe to come, but the narrative’s first half is all vicarious fun—new boat, new pickup and enough other goodies to make a comfort-rich hermit life for Jason. Hart has a way with one-liners and left-handed descriptions, as when measuring Jason’s ex-wife’s intelligence; she "thought AT&T was a place to get drinks because they always advertised about having the most bars." Add minor characters, like marina manager Memphis the Lighthouse, who believes Jason’s a terrorist, Tranquility, Jason’s father’s new hippie wife, and Bradley, the supercilious professor married to Jason’s mother, to this Florida milieu, and the action moves along quickly, albeit padded by a not-all-that-funny plot thread involving North Korea and human excrement as fertilizer.
Works by Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen offer more hyperbole and surrealism, respectively. Still, there's plenty of good fun here, with a sequel to come.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-57962-353-1
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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