Twin Peaks meets The Da Vinci Code in this surpassingly weird debut.
Traces of a mysterious young woman cause havoc.
One day Gregory Klein is punching numbers randomly into his telephone; the next, after a cryptic conversation with the stranger on the other end and a visit from the highly suspicious LAPD, he’s chasing across the country to find her. Jackie Savage, abandoned at her high school by the brother who usually picks her up, accepts a ride in a chauffeured limo and is whisked off into a fairy tale gone wrong. Hours after finding a photograph labeled “Hacker-19?” wedged under the pillow of his sofa, habitual self-mutilator Terry Young leaves his bride at the airport for reasons he can’t understand. Detective Joseph Malloy’s last day on the job turns into an off-the-clock obsession with the subject of a photo his successor finds in one of his open-case files. Contractor Debbie Wendell’s dragon-lady façade shivers and shatters when she finds a handmade wooden box at an airport construction site and learns that several passersby seem to be just as fascinated with it as she is. If these beginnings sound strange, their sequels are even stranger, as Kilgore’s five heroes keep knocking up against apparently omniscient strangers, obscurely motivated killers, fellow travelers who ask them probing questions and vanish and law-enforcement officers who seem determined to lock them up for the offense of looking for Shayla Hacker—for, as her Delphic former neighbor tells Gregory, “Once you’ve seen her eyes, you won’t be able to stop looking for her.” The search takes them as far as Cairo and Rio de Janeiro before coming to rest in Three Rooks, Ind., where a surprising number of impossible questions will be answered and a much larger number will not.
Twin Peaks meets The Da Vinci Code in this surpassingly weird debut.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-932557-36-7
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Bleak House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
This is secondhand tough-guy stuff, memorable only in that it feels like you've read it all before.
A former mob enforcer–turned–private eye is called in to investigate the savage murder of a Mafia leg-breaker in New York's Hudson Valley and finds himself on the trail of corporate espionage and a serial killer long believed dead.
The second book in Barron's series featuring Isaiah Coleridge (Blood Standard, 2018) seems, more than the debut, an obvious attempt to establish Coleridge as a strongman smartass in the Jack Reacher mold. The fight scenes are the written equivalent of action-movie choreography but without suspense, because the setup—Isaiah being constantly outnumbered—is so clearly a prelude for the no-sweat beat downs he doles out to the various thugs who get in his way. There's nary a memorable wisecrack in the entire book. What does stick in the mind are the sections that go out of their way to be writerly. It's not enough to say that it was a starry night in the Alaskan wilderness. Coleridge (the name is a clue to the series' literary aspirations) says, "I could've read a book by the cascading illumination of the stars." A later flash of insight is conveyed by "The scalpel of grim epiphany sliced into my consciousness." What with the narrative that spreads like spider cracks in glass and the far-too-frequent flashbacks to the man who was Coleridge's mentor, you might wish another scalpel had made its way through the manuscript.
This is secondhand tough-guy stuff, memorable only in that it feels like you've read it all before.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1289-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Not exactly groundbreaking, but fans will enjoy this cozy Christmas addition to a long-running series.
Christmas is nigh, and there’s a murder to solve.
Inspector Nivens may have ambitions far beyond his local posting, but he’s so hapless as a detective that it’s no surprise when he loses a sensitive case involving the murder of well-to-do Margaret Starling in her yard to Inspector Gerald Witherspoon of the Metropolitan Police. Witherspoon, whose record is stellar, is independently wealthy, good-natured, and unaware that for years his staff and friends, especially his clever housekeeper, Mrs. Jeffries, have fed him the clues that have been indispensable in closing his murder cases (Mrs. Jeffries Delivers the Goods, 2019, etc.). Determined to solve the puzzle of Margaret’s murder before Christmas, Witherspoon’s staff scatter throughout the neighborhood of the Starling residence, each of them searching for clues using their questioning methods tailored to every social stratum of Victorian London, from the housemaid to the well-heeled neighbors. Margaret’s recent odd behavior seems to have something to do with the Angel Alms Society of Fulham and Putney, where she was a generous donor who served on the advisory board. She was also suing Mrs. Huxton, her next-door neighbor, whom she accused of trying to ruin her reputation. Alibis are tested and possible enemies questioned. The suspects range from that neighbor to Margaret’s deceased niece’s husband to the vicar of St. Andrew’s Church, all of whom have reason to be angry with her. Mrs. Jeffries struggles to get on the right track as other members of the amateur detective group pass information to Witherspoon’s constable, who’s in on their scheme. It all comes down to love or money.
Not exactly groundbreaking, but fans will enjoy this cozy Christmas addition to a long-running series.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-49224-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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