A gripping, authentic-feeling psychological drama of dark sexual identities.
A psychological horror novel centered on a reverend who’s also a twisted killer.
The latest novel from Robbins (The Tu-Tone DeSoto, 2016) starts in small-town Hanson, Iowa, but quickly expands to take in New York’s Greenwich Village as it follows its darkly enigmatic main character, the Rev. Thomas Barragan. In the early 1960s, he leaves Iowa in the wake of his wife’s death and takes on a new identity as the Rev. Thomas Deavers. He then opens a church in a slum in the heart of New York’s Lower East Side, and a feisty construction contractor, Debbie Dantana, helps him transform an old coal cellar into a baptismal pool. In their off hours, she takes him to some of the city’s gay bars. The reverend dresses in drag (as his late wife), but he still seems like a wide-eyed Iowa yokel from the provinces. Robbins skillfully unfolds a parallel narrative that reveals the reverend as a diabolical mass murderer who conceives of himself as “Chamelea,” a dark, supernatural avatar who strengthens himself by killing victims and fusing their souls with his own. As the killer becomes more comfortable on the Lower East Side, more and more bodies start showing up, eventually prompting Lt. Marty Cohansen and private investigator Ray Nealy to suspect they have a serial killer on their hands. Robbins dramatizes the police-procedural aspects of his story with a gritty, atmospheric energy that extends to much of the rest of the book. The novel is heavily laden with the sights and sounds of the period, including the songs on the radio. A side plot involving the reverend’s disaffected young daughter, though affecting, feels slight next to the central conflict between a psychotic and investigators determined to stop him. Overall, though, Robbins has crafted an effusively talkative novel of appalling events in the heart of a now-vanished New York City.
A gripping, authentic-feeling psychological drama of dark sexual identities.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5186-9775-3
Page Count: 396
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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