edited by Etgar Keret ; Assaf Gavron ; translated by Yardenne Greenspan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 7, 2014
Editors Keret and Gavron stress not what makes Tel Aviv unique but what it has in common with other cities: its people’s...
Even in the Holy Land, people find ingenious ways to screw up their own lives, as the latest entry in Akashic’s Noir series proves.
Tel Aviv is a modern city in an ancient land. It has clubs where 20-year-olds like Essy and Danielle, in Julie Fermentto’s “Who’s a Good Boy!,” get drunk, bum cigarettes from strangers and look for love in all the wrong places. It has technology, like the electronic surveillance in Silje Bekeng’s “Swirl” and the computer Gideon Tzuk uses to watch pornography in Gon Ben Ari’s “Clear Recent History,” unaware that it’s watching him back. But its heartbeat is its people, looking to thrive or maybe just survive. In “Sleeping Mask,” by Gadi Taub, Shiri takes a new look at the world’s oldest profession to clear her father’s gambling debts. Srulik, in co-editor Gavron’s “Center,” switches between construction work when it’s sunny and private investigation when it rains. In Yoav Katz’s “The Tour Guide,” an entrepreneur offers tourists a look at famous crime scenes. And Margalit Bloch supplements her meager income after her husband’s death by selling off the possessions of people who died without heirs in Gai Ad’s “The Expendables.” Most touching are the people just looking to connect, like the grocery clerk who makes dinner for a customer in Deakla Keydar’s “Slow Cooking,” the barista who serves mineral water to the Grim Reaper in Alex Epstein’s “Death in Pajamas,” the hashish peddler who falls in love with a Russian thug’s sister in Antonio Ungar’s “Saïd the Good,” or the couple whose lives are turned inside out by their finicky dog in co-editor Keret’s “Allergies.”
Editors Keret and Gavron stress not what makes Tel Aviv unique but what it has in common with other cities: its people’s endless, often fruitless struggle to cash in on a losing hand.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61775-315-2
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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by Etgar Keret ; translated by Sondra Silverston & Nathan Englander & Jessica Cohen & Miriam Shlesinger & Yardenne Greenspan
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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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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
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by J.A. Jance
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by Patricia Cornwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2007
Proceed at your own risk.
Pioneering pathologist Kay Scarpetta (Trace, 2004, etc.) goes up against a wraithlike killer whose self-appointed mission is to “relieve others of their suffering.”
Practice, practice, practice. If only 16-year-old South Carolina tennis phenom Drew Martin had stuck to the court instead of going off to Rome to party, her tortured corpse wouldn’t be baffling the Italian authorities, headed inexplicably by medico legale Capt. Ottorino Poma, and the International Investigative Response team, which includes both Scarpetta and her lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley. But the young woman’s murder and the gruesome forensic riddles it poses are something of a sideshow to the main event: the obligatory maundering of the continuing cast. Wesley still won’t leave Boston for the woman he tepidly insists he loves. Scarpetta’s niece, computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, continues to be jealously protective of her aunt. Scarpetta’s investigator, Pete Marino, is so besotted by the trailer-trash pickup who’s pushing his buttons that he does some terrible things. And Scarpetta herself is threatened by every misfit in the known universe, from a disgruntled mortician to oracular TV shrink Marilyn Self. Cornwell’s trademark forensics have long since been matched by Karin Slaughter and CSI. What’s most distinctive about this venerable franchise is the kitchen-sink plotting; the soap-opera melodrama that prevents any given volume from coming to a satisfying end; and the emphasis on titanic battles between Scarpetta and a series of Antichrists.
Proceed at your own risk.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-15393-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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