Freemasonry, of course, figures into the equation. Quirky in presentation and good fun throughout, Cantero’s yarn pleases at...
Southern gothic meets Euro hipness in Catalan novelist Cantero’s inventive, enjoyable outing in postmodern mystery writing.
Take a mysterious mansion, “plus a noseless suspect, a dead criminal wanted in six states, one fugitive, a missing lawyer, seventeen people in the morgue, two in surgery, and lots of paperwork,” and you’ve got the makings of a scenario that’s surely good for setting tongues wagging in small-town Virginia. Yet most of the good citizens of Point Bless have long been unaware of the goings-on at the Wells mansion, where the ghosts of suicides wander among dark corridors and hidden rooms. Cantero lets us know at the outset that we’re in on a very long joke, with winking through-the-fourth-wall asides (“I’ve noticed that all manuscripts are bad; any book randomly opened in a friend’s house is good; the same book in a bookstore is bad. When this story is completed, that beginning will turn better”). Any story that features a lawyer named Glew and a butler named Strückner is automatically promising, never mind hesitant openings, and our protagonist’s sidekick is a welcome force of nature, a mute Irish girl who is both amanuensis and ninja. And if that protagonist starts off the proceedings wide-eyed and naïve, delighted by such small things as rural cafes with “many sauce bottles and thingies against the glass,” he emerges as a capable player in a game of poltergeists, hollowed-out books, malevolent masterminds and sundry secrets in a setting that wanders between real and dream worlds, alternate realities blending with elective affinities.
Freemasonry, of course, figures into the equation. Quirky in presentation and good fun throughout, Cantero’s yarn pleases at every turn.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-53815-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
Even readers who identify the criminal, motive, and modus operandi early on (and many readers will) can plan to stay up long...
Soldier-turned-soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher goes after a serial killer in a conventionally but nonetheless deeply satisfying whodunit.
In today's armed services, you lose even when you win—at least if you're a woman who files a sexual harassment complaint. Amy Callan and Caroline Cooke were both successful in their suits, which ended the careers of their alleged harassers. But Callan and Cooke ended up leaving the service themselves, and now they're both dead, murdered by a diabolical perp who keeps leaving behind the same crime scene—the victim's body submerged in a bathtub filled with camouflage paint—and not a single clue to the killer's identity or the cause of death. The FBI hauls in Reacher, who handled both women's complaints as an Army MP, as a prime suspect, then offers to upgrade him to a consulting investigator when their own surveillance gives him an alibi for a third killing. No thanks, says our hero, who's taken an instant dislike to FBI profiler Julia Lamarr, until the Feds' threats against his lawyer girlfriend Jodie Jacob (Tripwire, 1999) bring him into the fold. While Reacher is pretending to study lists of potential victims and suspects and fending off the government-sponsored advances of Quantico's comely Lisa Harper, the murderer is getting ready to pounce on a fourth victim: Lamarr's stepsister Alison. This latest coup does nothing to improve relations between Reacher and the Feebees, all of them determined to prove they're the toughest hombres in the parking lot, but it does set the stage for some honest sleuthing, some treacherous red herrings, and some convincing evidence for Reacher's assertion that all that profiling stuff is just plain common sense.
Even readers who identify the criminal, motive, and modus operandi early on (and many readers will) can plan to stay up long past bedtime and do some serious hyperventilating toward the end.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-399-14623-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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