An extraordinary story with a muddled execution.
A freighter smuggling kidnapped Chinese children into the United States is commandeered by the authorities in Rocha’s debut novel.
In 1995, Phil is an Immigration and Naturalization Service senior special agent assigned to its Organized Crime and Racketeering Unit, sometimes referred to as “Strike Force.” When a Chinese freighter in the Pacific Ocean is stopped and boarded by members of the U.S. Coast Guard, they discover 160 illegal immigrants, clearly headed for the United States. Phil is sent to Wake Island to interview the passengers, and he soon realizes that about 30 young boys are also onboard who aren’t related to the adults. He quickly uncovers the dark truth: these kids were kidnapped from their families to be sold into slavery, and many have been the victims of grim abuse, including rape. Phil is able to determine who the “snakeheads,” or smugglers, are, and their leader in the United States strategically applies for political asylum in order to avoid repatriation back to China. Much of the book reads like an official governmental record: there are the transcripts of testimony given by the kidnapped boys (in Chinese and English); transcripts from an asylum hearing for one of the snakeheads; notes from the interviews with the passengers; and even grainy black-and-white photographs. There’s also a subplot that follows a Russian spy who offers Phil (and Sharron, an FBI agent and Phil’s good friend) information about the sale of a nuclear bomb by the Russian Mafia. Rocha spent 30 years doing exactly Phil’s job, and so he confidently writes about both the nature of human trafficking and its investigation. The plotline about the smuggled children, in particular, is as mesmerizing as it is sad. However, the author calls his work a “quasi-fictional account” while also saying that he aims at the “pursuit of truth and accuracy”; the result of this is that the reader may be left confused about the line between creative contrivance and actual history. The subplot involving the Russian Mafia also seems completely gratuitous. As a result, it’s not clear why Rocha didn’t simply write a nonfiction memoir.
An extraordinary story with a muddled execution.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5028-2820-0
Page Count: 174
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
"There's got to be something wrong with somebody who'd do a thing like that." This is Perry Edward Smith, talking about himself. "Deal me out, baby...I'm a normal." This is Richard Eugene Hickock, talking about himself. They're as sick a pair as Leopold and Loeb and together they killed a mother, a father, a pretty 17-year-old and her brother, none of whom they'd seen before, in cold blood. A couple of days before they had bought a 100 foot rope to garrote them—enough for ten people if necessary. This small pogrom took place in Holcomb, Kansas, a lonesome town on a flat, limitless landscape: a depot, a store, a cafe, two filling stations, 270 inhabitants. The natives refer to it as "out there." It occurred in 1959 and Capote has spent five years, almost all of the time which has since elapsed, in following up this crime which made no sense, had no motive, left few clues—just a footprint and a remembered conversation. Capote's alternating dossier Shifts from the victims, the Clutter family, to the boy who had loved Nancy Clutter, and her best friend, to the neighbors, and to the recently paroled perpetrators: Perry, with a stunted child's legs and a changeling's face, and Dick, who had one squinting eye but a "smile that works." They had been cellmates at the Kansas State Penitentiary where another prisoner had told them about the Clutters—he'd hired out once on Mr. Clutter's farm and thought that Mr. Clutter was perhaps rich. And this is the lead which finally broke the case after Perry and Dick had drifted down to Mexico, back to the midwest, been seen in Kansas City, and were finally picked up in Las Vegas. The last, even more terrible chapters, deal with their confessions, the law man who wanted to see them hanged, back to back, the trial begun in 1960, the post-ponements of the execution, and finally the walk to "The Corner" and Perry's soft-spoken words—"It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize." It's a magnificent job—this American tragedy—with the incomparable Capote touches throughout. There may never have been a perfect crime, but if there ever has been a perfect reconstruction of one, surely this must be it.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1965
ISBN: 0375507906
Page Count: 343
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1965
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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