A powerful psychological drama.
With references to the Monster of Florence, a medieval serial murderer, and a secret Vatican sect, Carrisi’s (The Whisperer, 2012) second literary thriller draws readers into a labyrinth of evil.
In his derelict Rome villa, Jeremiah Smith lies comatose, "Kill Me" carved in his chest. The emergency responder physician begins working and then sees evidence that Smith is her twin sister’s killer. With that, Carrisi’s noir narrative descends into surrealism, soon drawing in Sandra Vega, police forensic analyst. Sandra’s husband, David, a freelance photojournalist with a penchant for danger, died five months earlier in a fall from a Rome building. Or was David pushed? Perhaps the penitenzieri know? The secret sect, remnants of the 12th-century Paenitentiaria Apostolica—The Tribunal of Souls—keeps “the largest and most up-to-date archive of evil in the world. Evils abound beyond Smith’s murders, and a penitenzieri may be entangled. Sandra stumbles upon Marcus, an amnesiac penitenzieri, and they confront other killings, past and current. Astor Boyash arranges a boy’s assassination to procure a heart for his grandson. Raffeale Altieri kills his father to avenge his mother. Paraplegic Frederico Noni kills his sister because she discovers his deadly perversion; and blind, retired detective Pietro Zinni kills Frederico because Pietro felt pity for Frederico originally. Carrisi writes beautifully—"Obedient little flames that bow their heads in unison at each draught"—and intimately appreciates Rome, its chapels, its narrow alleyways, its fountains and gardens. Confronting human depravity in a story shifting from the current day to the recent past, Carrisi’s second interwoven narrative thread follows a nameless hunter pursuing a transformist, a chameleonlike serial killer able to assume a victim’s personality. The appearance of mysterious Thomas Schalber, Interpol undercover agent, adds complexity, but it’s Marcus and the other penitenzieri, "guards appointed to defend the border" at the "place where the world of light meets the world of darkness," who inhabit the bloody ground where good and evil clash.
A powerful psychological drama.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-24679-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by...
Almost as frustrating as it is commanding, McCarthy’s ninth (and first since the completion of his Border Trilogy: Cities of the Plain, 1998, etc.) is a formidable display of stunningly written scenes that don’t quite cohere into a fully satisfying narrative.
It’s a bleak chronicle of murder, revenge and implacable fate pocked with numerous echoes of McCarthy’s great Blood Meridian (1985). Here, the story’s set in 1980 in southern Texas near the Mexican border, where aging Sheriff Bell, a decorated WWII veteran, broods heroically over the territory he’s sworn to protect, while—in a superb, sorrowful monologue—acknowledging the omnipresence of ineradicable evil all around him. Then the focus trains itself on Vietnam vet Llewellyn Moss, a hunter who stumbles upon several dead bodies, a stash of Mexican heroin and more than $2 million in cash that he absconds with. The tale then leaps among the hunted (Moss), an escaped killer (Anton Chigurh), whose crimes include double-crossing the drug cartel from which the money was taken, the Army Special Forces freelancer (Carson Wells) hired by druglords and—in dogged pursuit of all the horrors spawned by their several interactions—the intrepid, however flawed and guilty, stoical Sheriff Bell: perhaps the most fully human and sympathetic character McCarthy has ever created. The justly praised near-biblical style, an artful fusion of brisk declarative sentences and vivid, simple images, confers horrific intensity on the escalating violence and chaos, while precisely dramatizing the sense of nemesis that pursues and punishes McCarthy’s characters (scorpions in a sealed bottle). But this eloquent melodrama is seriously weakened by its insufficiently varied reiterated message: “if you were Satan . . . tryin to bring the human race to its knees, what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by William Faulkner.Pub Date: July 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40677-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
IN THE NEWS
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on...
After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that’s as dark as any of Patrick’s cases.
Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean’s parents’ house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy’s friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it’s Jimmy’s turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he’s got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who’s done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend’s official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave’s wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else’s blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it’s easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all.
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters’ heads.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-16316-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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