Queer erotica with an absurd premise, pulpy fight scenes, and a few serious messages.
Carter offers an over-the-top gay erotic sendup of the secret-agent genre.
In a novel full of bawdily named characters, including Dutch operative Phillip Mihol, Bulgarian Ilov Giandik, and villainous Spanish mastermind Manuel Azramar, Vietnam-born spy Don Kee Dong sets out on a world-spanning mission to infiltrate a shadowy criminal enterprise known as HO. The espionage story is definitely secondary to the sex scenes involving the well-endowed hero, which are nonstop—and that’s the point, as Carter himself explains in an author’s note, in which he says that the novel is intended as a response to the antigay bias he experienced as a working librarian; he calls his book a “sexy adventure” that’s “all pure globetrotting queer joy!” But try as he might to simply be as provocative as an author could possibly hope to be, Carter succeeds in infusing the sexcapades with some substantive weight as well. Sure, it’s a world of wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling sex, but that’s not all it is; the book also shows a clear renunciation and rebuke of sexual assault amid the wildness. The narrative’s tongue-in-cheek tone is so pervasive that sudden serious allusions, as when Dong is asked to reconsider HO’s true nature, can be jarring: “I won’t say they’re all good, but during various purges such as the Inquisition and the Holocaust, HO saved countless lives,” says Mihol. “HO got thousands of queers and Jews out of Nazi Germany alone, and not only their members.” There’s also a lot of two-fisted violence in another nod to the secret-agent genre—particularly the brutality of Ian Fleming’s James Bond capers: “I went in as if to punch with my left and instead I threw dirt in his eyes with my right. I then broke his kneecap. That’ll hurt, I thought. As if on cue, he screamed in pain. I punched him again in the windpipe.”
Queer erotica with an absurd premise, pulpy fight scenes, and a few serious messages.Pub Date: yesterday
ISBN: 9781970702002
Page Count: 174
Publisher: LA Notable Books
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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