A compelling tale plagued by awkward prose.
A retired Swiss advertising exec is hired to inspect a wealthy banker’s mining outfit in Merz’s debut novel.
After his wife dies, 45-year-old Tom Sutter trades in his office desk for a surfboard in Hawaii, where he settles with his children. Tom anticipates a beach-filled future, until he receives a call from a former partner, Swiss banker Beat Vischer. Vischer purchased a mine in Utah and hires the reluctant Tom to help with marketing by investigating it. Problem is, this is no ordinary mine. Utah’s Wah Wah Mountains are one of few locations in the world that produces red emerald—“the rarest gemstone on earth,” with a history marred by violence and greed to prove it. Immediately upon arriving, Tom discovers Mormon miners whose teeth are rotting from soda and jelly beans, a startlingly low production rate and other questionable problems. More perplexing are the shady figures overseeing the mine, most notably Byron Coots, company CEO and chairman, who’s up to some dirty dealings. Tom’s mission turns dangerous when someone attempts to kill him, ultimately leading him to meet lovely gemologist Ming Cheng, who reminds him of his late wife. Tom’s suspicion spikes when he and Cheng discover a red emerald elsewhere, unearthing numerous scandals and rapidly increasing mining-related cancer rates in Utah. Tom becomes an unlikely hero, though it’s initially difficult to care about him. His early retirement and new life seem to raise his stakes, but Merz spends too little time with him at the beginning; in fact, Tom flashes a smile after more or less being pushed into the job, expressing little motivation or regret for taking it. Likewise, a few spelling errors and awkward syntax hold things up, especially in light of the rapid-fire plotline that jumps around in time, place and perspective. Painfully direct exposition also sometimes leaves scenes lacking emotional intensity, as when Tom seeks revenge on the man he believes attempted to kill him: “He hates Jim who pushed him over the edge and now plays Samaritan.” But beyond technicalities, the compassionate story—mostly set in the early to mid-2000s in numerous exotic locales—has moments of true suspense and insight into a corrupt industry largely untapped in fiction, presented here with intrigue from an insider’s eye.
A compelling tale plagued by awkward prose.Pub Date: July 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482503135
Page Count: 228
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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