There isn’t enough Xanax in anyone’s medicine cabinet to calm the jitters these 20 skillful stories will unleash on a...
Turning away from the spooky and toward the psychologically fraught, the latest edition of this venerable series offers variations on themes that may well be uppermost in Americans’ minds.
Pursuit looms large in this year’s collection. Tiny apparitions challenge the mental balance of a savvy Hollywood makeup artist in Megan Abbott’s “The Little Men.” Hardworking Loomis is dogged by stalkers who have a novel way of getting him to be kinder to his wife in Steve Almond’s “Okay, Now Do You Surrender?” In “Lafferty’s Ghost,” Dennis McFadden’s layabout hero is trying to mend his marriage as well, but his efforts are derailed as much by his own poor judgment as by big men with big guns. And it isn’t always clear who’s the hunter and who’s the prey, as Elmore Leonard shows in “For Something to Do.” Escape is another favorite theme this year. In “Toward the Company of Others,” Matt Bell gives a scavenger the agonizing choice of saving an imprisoned child or getting away with his ill-gotten gains. The heroine of Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Christmas Eve at the Exit” struggles to make the holiday meaningful for her 10-year-old daughter while the pair are on the run. Escaping from prison isn’t as easy as it sounds in Bruce Robert Coffin’s “Fool Proof.” And Robert Lopresti’s “Street of the Dead House” shows that even for the supposedly lower species, the ultimate escape isn’t from imprisonment but from the mystery of one’s own mind. Perhaps Lydia Fitzpatrick sums up best the insecurity that marks so many of this year’s sharpest stories in “Safety,” a tale that will chill the spine of anyone who lived through the Sandy Hook massacre: no one is ever truly safe.
There isn’t enough Xanax in anyone’s medicine cabinet to calm the jitters these 20 skillful stories will unleash on a worried world.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 9780544527188
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Elliptical and often oracular, but also remarkably penetrating and humane. The most illuminating analogies are not to other...
A prior’s murder takes Quebec’s Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his sidekick, Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir, inside the walls of the monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loupes.
The Gilbertine order, long extinct except for the two dozen brothers who live on an island apart from the rest of the world, enforces silence on its members. In the absence of speech, a raised eyebrow or averted gaze can speak intense hostility. Now someone has found a new way to communicate such hostility: by bashing Frère Mathieu, the monastery’s choirmaster and prior, over the head. Gamache and Beauvoir soon find that the order is devoted heart and soul to Gregorian chant; that its abbot, Dom Philippe, has recruited its members from among the ranks of other orders for their piety, their musical abilities and a necessary range of domestic and maintenance skills; and that an otherworldly recording the brothers had recently made of Gregorian chants has sharply polarized the community between the prior’s men, who want to exploit their unexpected success by making another recording and speaking more widely of their vocation, and the abbot’s men, who greet the prospect of a more open and worldly community with horror. Nor are conflicts limited to the holy suspects. Gamache, Beauvoir and Sûreté Chief Superintendent Sylvain Françoeur, arriving unexpectedly and unwelcome, tangle over the proper way to conduct the investigation, the responsibility for the collateral damage in Gamache’s last case (A Trick of the Light, 2011, etc.), and Beauvoir’s loyalty to his two chiefs and himself in ways quite as violent as any their hosts can provide.
Elliptical and often oracular, but also remarkably penetrating and humane. The most illuminating analogies are not to other contemporary detective fiction but to The Name of the Rose and Murder in the Cathedral.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-65546-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
BOOK TO SCREEN
After a flight in fantasy with When the Wind Blows (1998), Patterson goes to ground with another slash-and-squirm psychokiller page-turner, this one dedicated to “the millions of Alex Cross readers, who so frequently ask, can’t you write faster?” By day, Geoffrey Shafer is a charming, 42-year-old British Embassy paper-pusher with a picture-perfect family and a shady past as an MI-6 secret agent. Come sundown, he swallows a pharmacy of psychoactive pills, gulps three black coffees loaded with sugar, and roams the streets of Washington, D.C., in a battered cab, where, disguised as a black man, he rolls dice to determine which among his black female fares he—ll murder. Afterwards he dumps his naked victims in crime-infested back alleys of black- slum neighborhoods, then sends e-mails boasting of his accomplishments to three other former MI-6 agents involved in a hellish Internet role-playing game. “I sensed I was at the start of another homicide mess,” sighs forensic-psychologist turned homicide-detective Alex Cross. Cross yearns to catch the “Jane Doe murderer” but is thwarted by Det. Chief George Pittman, who assigns sexy Det. Patsy Hampton to investigate Cross and come up with a reason for dismissing him. Meanwhile, Cross’s fiancÇe is kidnaped during a Bermuda vacation, and an anonymous e-mail warns him to back off. He doesn’t, of course, and just when it appears that Patterson is sleep-walking through his story, Cross nabs Shafer minutes after Shafer kills Det. Hampton. During the subsequent high-visibility trail, Shafer manages to make the jury believe that he’s innocent and that Cross was trying to frame him. When all seems lost, a sympathetic British intelligence chief offers to help Cross bring down Shafer, and the other homicidal game-players, during a showdown on the breezy beaches of Jamaica. Kinky mayhem, a cartoonish villain, regular glimpses of the kindly Cross caring for his loved ones, and an ending that spells a sequel: Patterson’s fans couldn’t ask for more.
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-316-69328-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
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