This "cartographic thriller" by the British-born, Los Angeles–based Nicholson doesn't always rise to its subject, but it...
Young women with maps crudely tattooed on their backs hold answers to the mysteries posed in Nicholson’s arch urban thriller.
No one knows who kidnapped the women, blindfolded them and etched the maps into their skin—they're otherwise unharmed and promptly returned home. But several people are interested in the maps, which seem to point to a shadowy underground where an unidentified reward awaits. Wrobleski, a murderous criminal, will do anything to lay his hands on it. He bullies Billy, an aimless parking-lot owner with a jaded 12-year-old daughter, into collecting the tattooed women and acting as his henchman. Among those Billy roughs up is Zak, a cartography-store clerk who becomes involved with the hard-edged Marilyn; while privately dealing with the trauma of being defiled by a tattoo attacker years ago, she's combing the city for clues on the disappearance of her grandfather. She lives in the long-shuttered Telestar Hotel, a ’60s relic he designed. At times, the novel comes off like a sardonic answer to the film comedy It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, with its odd assortment of characters, rapid pacing and offbeat touches. But the author, who has also written a nonfiction book called The Lost Art of Walking (2008), is seriously devoted to the physical history of places, as reflected in the wealth of maps in the book—including the unsavory Rape Map, which charts where various assaults have taken place. "Maps are always nostalgic one way or another," says Zak. The novel also speaks to how cities are reshaped and, more importantly, reimagined.
This "cartographic thriller" by the British-born, Los Angeles–based Nicholson doesn't always rise to its subject, but it does a good job of making us think about our surroundings and the people in them.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-16904-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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
Those not knowing King’s Dark Tower series or The Talisman will follow all this easily enough. Many admiring King’s recent,...
Coauthors King and Straub, together again (The Talisman, 1984), take a Wisconsin Death Trip into parallel universes.
The Fisherman, who copycats long-dead serial killer Albert Fish, has been chopping up little kids in French Landing, Wisconsin, and sending letters to the children’s parents identical to those Fish sent parents 67 years ago—letters never made public, so how does The Fisherman do this? The local police chief asks for help from Jack Sawyer (hero of The Talisman), a Los Angeles homicide detective now in retirement. As a child, Jack flipped into the Territories, the parallel world in The Talisman, but has since forgotten his trip. What about the all-black Black House in the woods? Well, only Charles Burnside (Alzheimer’s) and Tinky Winky Judy Marshall (just plain crazy) know the Black House is the doorway to Abbalah, the entrance to hell—and Judy’s son Tyler is apparently the killer’s fourth victim. Jack’s new buddy, blind Henry Leyden, a radio deejay with four discrete identities no one knows are his, can’t talk Jack into taking the case. But when little Irma Freneau’s gnawed foot arrives in a shoebox on Jack’s welcome mat, Jack flips and lands in the Territories. The Territories confer a sacred magic and, in Jack’s case, absolute luck that lets him win his every bet or endeavor. Tyler, it happens, is telekinetic, and has been abducted by the Crimson King. All universes are held in place by the Dark Tower, the great interdimensional axle the Crimson King wants to destroy. Jack must save Tyler from the furnace-lands below Black House—and here the novel strives for depth, though interest dwindles.
Those not knowing King’s Dark Tower series or The Talisman will follow all this easily enough. Many admiring King’s recent, subtler work, though, may find these blood-spattered pages a step backward into dreamslash & gutspill.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50439-7
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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