Also appearing: Charlie Stella’s gay priests, Val McDermid’s non-award-winning author, Laura Lippman’s shoeshine man and...
Skip the extensive but mostly superfluous introductory essays on the year 2004 in mystery and dive into the generous and much more compelling evidence.
Soft-pedaling the international scope that’s sometimes a keynote of this annual collection, editors Gordon and Greenberg have gathered a large and varied crop of English-language crime stories. The best of their best are typically wide-ranging. Robert S. Levison pits a hit man against a Middle American town. Robert Barnard’s murder victim isn’t quite the girl she seemed. Aliya Whiteley’s imaginary friend turns deadly. Dennis Murphy assassin looks back as he readies himself to shoot. And Luke Sholer provides a miraculously compressed account of revenge for the sarin attack in the Tokyo subway. The rest of the stories aren’t up to the same high level, but practically all are worth the time, from the leadoff pair of offbeat Sherlockian adventures by Gary Lovisi (mystical) and Jeffery Deaver (cynical) to a trio of historicals. Lillian Stewart Carl literally resurrects Lord Robert Dudley's wife Amy Robsart; Max Allan Collins and Matthew V. Clemens check in on Mae West; and Christine Matthews pays homage to Fatty Arbuckle.
Also appearing: Charlie Stella’s gay priests, Val McDermid’s non-award-winning author, Laura Lippman’s shoeshine man and lesser entries by Francis M. Nevins, Martyn Waits, Joyce Carol Oates and many, many more.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7867-1643-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
Looks like Neal Carey, the peripatetic agent of that free- lance justice troop Friends of the Family, will never get back to New York to write his dissertation on Tobias Smollett. This time he's sprung from three years in a Chinese monastery (The Trail to Buddha's Mirror, 1992) only to be sent undercover as a ranch-hand in the Nevada plains to scout out the Sons of Seth, a white- supremacist flock that's his best hope for locating two-year-old Cody McCall, snatched from his Hollywood mother during a paternal weekend. Neal settles in deep, of course, and his ritual ordeals- -having to sell out the rancher who took him in, breaking off his romance with tough schoolmarm Karen Hawley, going up against rotten-apple Cal Strekker, getting ordered to kill his Friendly mentor Joe Graham—are as predictable as the trademark dose of mysticism as the bodies pile up, and as the certainty that when the dust settles, Neal won't be back at school. Winslow's Aryan crazies don't have the threatening solidity of Stephen Greenleaf's (Southern Cross, p. 1102 ), but Neal's latest adventure is full of entertaining derring-do.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09934-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
O'Brien proves to be the Oliver Stone of literature, reiterating the same Vietnam stories endlessly without adding any insight. Politician John Wade has just lost an election, and he and his wife, Kathy, have retired to a lakeside cabin to plan their future when she suddenly disappears. O'Brien manages to stretch out this simple premise by sticking in chapters consisting of quotes from various sources (both actual and fictional) that relate to John and Kathy. An unnamed author — an irritating device that recalls the better-handled but still imperfect "Tim O'Brien" narrator of The Things They Carried (1990) — also includes lengthy footnotes about his own experiences in Vietnam. While the sections covering John in the third person are dry, these first-person footnotes are unbearable. O'Brien uses a coy tone (it's as though he's constantly whispering "Ooooh, spooky!"), but there is no suspense: The reader is acquainted with Kathy for only a few pages before her disappearance, so it's impossible to work up any interest in her fate. The same could be said of John, even though he is the focus of the book. Flashbacks and quotes reveal that John was present at the infamous Thuan Yen massacre (for those too thick-headed to understand the connection to My Lai, O'Brien includes numerous real-life references). The symbolism here is beyond cloying. As a child John liked to perform magic tricks, and he was subsequently nicknamed "Sorcerer" by his fellow soldiers — he could make things disappear, get it? John has been troubled for some time. He used to spy on Kathy when they were in college, and his father's habit of calling the chubby boy "Jiggling John" apparently wounded him. All of this is awkwardly uncovered through a pretentious structure that cannot disguise the fact that there is no story here. Sinks like a stone.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 061870986X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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