The opportunities for cliché are endless, but Wagman avoids most of them. Matters of timing aside, a satisfying glimpse into...
A sometimes slow-moving but evocative study in the oddball psychology—or better, psychologies—that is as much a Southern California hallmark as sun and surf.
Winnie Parker, her first name suggestive of victory, is a classic casualty: Her husband, a TV celebrity, has dumped her for a young woman with perfect breasts (“Lacy said Jessica’s boobs were fake, but Winnie thought they were just fresh and unused”), and now she’s left to cope with the harrowing hells of raising a teenage daughter single-handedly. Lacy, the rebellious daughter, is experimenting with things Winnie would prefer her to stay away from. From nearby, someone is watching all this, biding his time like a coiled rattlesnake until striking—in this instance, by kidnapping Winnie for reasons that become darker as the story unfolds. Wagman (Spontaneous, 2000, etc.), a screenwriter and novelist, is perfectly at home along the tortuous freeways and hidden arroyos of L.A.; a bonus of her insightful character study is a tour of the strange world of reptile trading, with the villain of the piece keeping his house jungly hot for the benefit of an iguana and another very bad person who “masqueraded as a photographer” stripping the wild of skinks and chameleons, snakes and salamanders. The bad guys are as redneck as the protagonist of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief but with nowhere near the manners, and it’s Winnie’s challenge to keep up with and stay ahead of them while remaining unraped and unkilled. In the end, what unfolds is a perfect plan gone awry—though, dreamed up by stupid people, the plan is of course nowhere near perfect, and therefore it goes just as sideways as it was foreordained to do. The atmosphere is as dense as the steamy, iguana-rich jungle of Oren’s dreams, with Wagman’s pacing sometimes slowing to a crawl, whereupon the impatient reader will have to resist the urge to jump ahead and get on with it.
The opportunities for cliché are endless, but Wagman avoids most of them. Matters of timing aside, a satisfying glimpse into a herpetological demimonde—and the weird households of sunny SoCal.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-93543-964-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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
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