by Ed McBain ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 14, 2015
Although Ray’s wild adventures seem to get less stressful as they go along, McBain already has voice and tone well in hand...
This pulpy 1952 first novel by the future creator of the 87th Precinct (Fiddlers, 2005, etc.) traces three nightmare days in the life of an addict on the run.
Fallen piano player Ray Stone, who’ll do anything for a fix, hooks up with Eileen Chalmers, who offers him a night of sex and heroin and shows him 16 more ounces of uncut product. When he wakes up after the debauchery, Eileen is dead in his bed, shot twice in the belly, and the drugs are gone. Ray’s attempts to promote his next fix from his father and his former girlfriend, Jeannie, both of whom know all about his habit, are of limited success, and his regular dealer naturally refuses to extend credit. So Ray decides to go looking not for more heroin but for Eileen’s killer. From this foundational implausibility flow many others. Everyone Ray talks to, from Eileen’s husband, bandleader Dale Kramer, to his new sweetie, exotic dancer Rusty O’Donnell, to Scat Lewis, frontman of the combo she sang with, to Barbara Cole, the singer who switched gigs with Eileen, is improbably forthcoming—Babs even takes him to bed—and when the inevitable heavies looking for that pound of H grab Ray, intent on making him talk, he gets away from them and keeps asking questions. Ray’s picture is on the front page of every newspaper in New York, but no one recognizes him, and the police remain a step or two behind right up to the denouement.
Although Ray’s wild adventures seem to get less stressful as they go along, McBain already has voice and tone well in hand in this treasurable blast from the past, which looks forward in fascinating ways to the first part of Candyland (2001). Disgraced private eye Matt Cordell headlines a bonus story focusing on another hopeless addict.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78116-606-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hard Case Crime
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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