Readers who go the distance, recognizing Lin’s greater interest in worldbuilding than storytelling, will be rewarded, as in...
Chen Jing-nan is reunited with his uncle, colorful Taiwanese gangster Big Eye, just in time to get saddled with an impossible task.
Families typically come together during Taiwan’s Mid-Autumn Festival, but that’s not why Big Eye is reaching out to Jing-nan. His daughter, Mei-Ling, has all the anti-authoritarian habits of other 16-year-old girls plus one that puts her over the top: her romance with Chong, whom Big Eye hates not because he’s a petty criminal—Big Eye is surrounded by those—but because he’s a “darkie” from Indonesia. Since Mei-Ling refuses to give him up, her father has resolved to exile her to Taipei so that Jing-nan, assisted by Big Eye lieutenants Gao Min-kung and Whistle, can keep a watchful eye on her from his perch at Unknown Pleasures, the skewer and stew stand he runs in the Shilin Night Market. For a while things go smoothly. Jing-nan wangles his cousin an internship with his high-powered ex-schoolmate Peggy Lee’s family firm. She shows real aptitude for the work—and evidence of musical gifts far greater than those of Nancy, Jing-nan’s girlfriend, who plays in the band Boar Pour More. Chong, when Jing-nan runs into him, seems to be an inoffensive guy who says it’s over between him and Mei-Ling anyway. But it’s only a matter of time before something goes wrong, and eventually something does, although genre fans on the hunt for mystery and suspense will have checked out long before then.
Readers who go the distance, recognizing Lin’s greater interest in worldbuilding than storytelling, will be rewarded, as in Ghost Month (2014), with a richly detailed insider’s tour of contemporary Taiwan.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61695-733-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Koontz widens his canvas dramatically while dimming the hard brilliance common to his shorter winners:1995’s taut masterpiece, Intensity, and 1998’s moon-drenched midsummer nightmare, Seize the Night. This time the author takes up mind control, wiring his tale into the brainwashing epics The Manchurian Candidate and last spring’s film The Matrix. The laser-beam brightness of his earlier bestsellers fades, however, as he stuffs each scene with draining chitchat and extra plotting that seldom rings with novelty. Martine “Martie” Rhodes, a video-game designer, has developed a rare mental disorder: autophobia, fear of oneself. Meanwhile, her husband Dusty’s young half-brother, Skeet Caulfield, has decided to jump off the roof of a building the two men are repairing—because Skeet has seen the Angel of the next world, who has revealed that things are pretty wonderful there, and he wants to come on over. Martie’s best friend, real-estate agent Susan Jagger, is newly coping with agoraphobia, fear of the outdoors. What’s more, Susan knows she’s being visited and raped at night by her separated husband, Eric, although all her doors and windows are locked. She can’t remember these rapes, but her panties are stained with semen. So when she sets up a camcorder to record her sleeping hours, she gets a huge surprise after viewing the tape. How these mental and physical events have come about—ditto the psychiatric background of the Keanuphobe millionairess who shows up (yes! she fears Keanu Reeves)—has something to do with the ladies’ psychiatrist, Dr. Mark Ahriman, the son of a famous dead movie director whose eyes the doctor keeps in a bottle of formaldehyde and studies, in hopes of siphoning off Dad’s inspiration. Although the whole story could have been told to better effect in 300 pages, Koontz deftly sidesteps clichÇs of expression while nonetheless applying an air pump to the suspense: an MO that keeps his yearly 17-million book sales afloat.
Pub Date: Dec. 28, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10666-X
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Utter non-scents.
Die-hard Yankee candle maker Stella Wright (Murder’s No Votive Confidence, 2018) gets caught up in a trans-Atlantic murder plot.
Stella thoroughly enjoys her trip to Paris even though her mother, perfume expert Millie Wright, who’s scheduled to speak on a panel entitled “The Art of Scent Extractions” at the World Perfumery Conference, gets preempted by a murder. Sadly, once they’re back home in Nantucket, things get even weirder. Stella receives an anonymous note threatening her mom if Stella doesn’t turn over a secret formula hidden in Millie’s bag. Her mom can’t help because she’s in the hospital courtesy of an overenthusiastic attempt by Stella’s cat, Tinker, to befriend her. While trespassing on a suspicious sailboat, Stella meets U.S. Agent Sarah Hill, who warns her that well-known anarchist Rex Laruam plans to disrupt the upcoming Peace Jubilee using a stolen formula he secreted in Millie’s bag after he stabbed the agent guarding it back in Paris. Ignoring the advice of her friend Andy Southerland, a Nantucket cop, to leave detection to the professionals, Stella tries to unmask the elusive Laruam. As she spies on a bevy of unlikely suspects, the plot spirals further and further out of control: There’s a Canadian couple staying at an Airbnb run by Stella’s cousin Chris who whisper sweet but suspicious nothings in the dark, a shovel-wielding schoolmarm, a gang of old geezers who have a collective crush on Millie, a surprise 30th-birthday party planned by Stella’s beau, Peter Bailey, and an even more surprising impromptu airplane ride.
Utter non-scents.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2141-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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