Instead of sharing the hero’s fears, fans of Westlake’s Dortmunder series, which got started around the same time with The...
Westlake, nine years dead but still enjoying a very productive season (Forever and a Death, 2017), returns in a bright reprint from 1974 that shows him working the field in which he remains unrivaled: the comic caper in which Murphy’s law reigns supreme.
A practical joke gone wrong got Harold Künt five to 15 years in upstate New York’s Stonevelt Penitentiary. Even though he can’t control his compulsion to play jokes on everyone he can reach, Harry also wants to keep his head down, do his time, and return to society. Not happening. He stumbles on a group of seven cons who’ve commandeered an undiscovered tunnel, not to break out of the prison, but to leave one or two at a clip on self-appointed thefts and furloughs and return before they’re discovered. It’s nice to be back in the outside world, especially among oblivious citizens who call Harry “Harry Kent.” But it’s not so nice to hear that Phil Giffin, Joe Wheeler, Max Nolan, and the rest of the gang plan to break out just long enough to rob not one, but two banks, Fiduciary Federal Trust and Western National, taking advantage of the fact that they all have the ultimate alibi. The thought of pulling off a robbery gives Harry the willies; every single way he can imagine the plot ending looks disastrous. Nor can he pull out of the heist his fellow prisoners have generously allowed him to buy into without arousing their suspicions. Worst of all, Harry’s reputation has convinced Warden Eustace B. Gadmore that he’s the one who keeps working signs announcing “HELP I AM BEING HELD PRISONER” into preposterously unlikely settings, and it’s only a matter of time before the warden lowers the boom.
Instead of sharing the hero’s fears, fans of Westlake’s Dortmunder series, which got started around the same time with The Hot Rock (1970), will appreciate the author’s consummate blending of comedy and suspense, often within the same sentence, and rejoice that more Westlakes are slated for resurrection.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78565-682-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hard Case Crime
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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