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 ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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