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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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