Boston gets gory in this enjoyable, horror-tinged crime tale.
A thriller puts Boston cops on the trail of a twisted serial killer.
In downtown Boston, Detective Ray Hanley has just left a courtroom and intends to meet his brother, Jacob, for a charity golf tournament. But his phone rings and his partner, Billy Devlin, calls him to the Granite Rail Quarries to investigate a death. The body fished from a quarry is Danny “the Mule” McDougal. Danny’s genitals and face have been creatively mutilated, and the detectives realize that this grisly, insulting death probably isn’t the work of either the Giabatti or Flaherty crime families. The killer, calling himself the Artist, kidnaps people who have wronged him, then tortures and mutilates them to death. The next victim, art gallery owner Barry Finkleton, ends up on display in the Stony Brook Reservation, hanging from a tree with crafted spider legs stuck where his own limbs used to be. Meanwhile, Jack Flaherty, the Irish mob boss, says that “the truce is over” between him and Italian kingpin Sal Giabatti. As Boston starts to resemble the bullet-riddled Old West, Ray grows more comfortable around his ex-girlfriend Tina Bolton, who works in the medical examiner’s office. The collision of his personal and professional lives may rock the entire city. In this second thriller starring the Hanley brothers, Cavignano (The Righteous and the Wicked, 2014, etc.) juxtaposes Clive Barker-style horror with Boston neighborhoods like Southie and oddities such as the “bright orange Tyrannosaurus Rex” on Route 1. The Artist’s behavior is gag-inducing and includes feeding his victims slices of one another and raping them. Relief comes during scenes of domestic bliss in Charlestown, where Ray and his wife raise three children. Elsewhere, the tone is macho but campy, especially Billy’s dialogue (“When life gives you melons, you gotta squeeze them while they’re ripe”). Overall, the author cracks his whip over the narrative, pushing the Flaherty family and the Artist under a single, villainous spotlight. Readers fatigued by bloated series may appreciate this. Then again, Cavignano’s vibrant imagination might flourish in a decompressed, multibook storyline. Here, though, his breakneck pacing consistently entertains.
Boston gets gory in this enjoyable, horror-tinged crime tale.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 427
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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