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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Sophomore slump.
More psychological suspense from the author of Final Girls (2017).
Anyone who grew up watching horror movies in the 1980s knows that summer camp can be a dangerous place. It certainly was for Emma Davis during her first stay at Camp Nightingale. The other three girls in her cabin disappeared one night, never to return. Fifteen years have passed, years in which Emma has revisited this ordeal again and again through her work as a painter. When she’s offered another opportunity to spend a summer at the camp, Emma barely hesitates. She’s ostensibly there to serve as an art instructor, but her real mission is to finally find out what happened to her friends. Thrillers are, by their very nature, formulaic. Sager met the demands of the genre while offering a fresh, anxiety-inducing story in Final Girls. The author is less successful here. Part of the problem is the pacing. It’s so slow that the reader has ample time to notice how contrived the novel’s setup is. Emma is clearly unwell, so her decision to go back to the site of her trauma makes some sense, but it’s hard to believe that the camp’s owners would want her back, especially since she played a pivotal role in turning one of them into a suspect and nearly ruining his life. As a first-person narrator, Emma withholds a lot of information, which feels fake and frustrating; moreover, the revelations—when they come—are hardly worth the wait. And it’s hard to trust an author who gets so many details wrong. For example, Emma’s first summer at Camp Nightingale would have been around 2003 or so. It beggars belief that a 13-year-old millennial wouldn’t be amply prepared for her first period, but that’s what Sager wants readers to think. There’s a contemporary scene in which girls walk by in a cloud of baby powder, Noxzema, and strawberry-scented shampoo, imagery that is intensely evocative of the 1970s and '80s—not so much 2018. The novel is shot through with such discordant moments, moments that lift us right out of the narrative and shatter the suspense.
Sophomore slump.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4307-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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