Just right for beach reading at Gulfport—or Tunica, for that matter: a whodunit that aspires to literature, albeit of the...
A steamy, swampy tale of international nastiness by accomplished thriller writer Iles (True Evil, 2006, etc.).
Penn Cage, steely protagonist of two previous novels (The Quiet Game, 1999; Turning Angel, 2005), is now mayor of Natchez, Miss., and, after something of a midlife crisis involving both widowhood and a career change, heading deep into middle age. Penn reconnects with a childhood friend who brings him dark word of bad things happening down in the Devil’s Punchbowl, a hollow off the Mississippi River where bad guys have long disposed of their victims. The bad guys are no longer the river rats and Confederate deserters of old; now they come from all over the world—the toughest of them, it seems, from Ireland—to do a thriving trade in illegal things surrounding the already lucrative business of legalized gambling. Those things include drugs, underage prostitution, white slavery and dogfighting. The novel’s perfectly rendered atmospherics and sometimes depressive sense of miasmal gloom (“I’d be dog bait, and that’s a truly terrible way to die”) frequently invoke Faulkner, though Iles’ prose is more straightforward. The mayhem is altogether postmodern, a perfect vehicle for Billy Bob Thornton (as heavy or hero, your pick) and a shattering experience for everyone involved, not least Cage’s sometime girlfriend, who finds herself deeper in the mire than anyone might have wanted, and his boyhood pal, for whom things do not turn out happily. Strong characters, male and female; utterly convincing villains in Brooks Brothers suits and private jets; and a believable premise. All these elements add up to a tale that ends, yes, on the promise of a sequel to come.
Just right for beach reading at Gulfport—or Tunica, for that matter: a whodunit that aspires to literature, albeit of the Southern Gothic variety.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9251-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
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The result is a nail-biting thriller but a terrible mystery, with the third-act jitters so frequently in evidence in the...
Scottoline takes another leave of absence from the law firm of Rosato & DiNunzio (Exposed, 2017, etc.) to fulfill a mother’s fondest wish and then makes her pay through the nose for it.
Maggie Ippoliti hasn’t seen or heard from her daughter since shortly after she was divorced from the girl’s father, startup wizard Florian Desroches. Feeling abandoned by the mother who fell victim to postpartum psychosis, Anna Desroches has never wanted anything to do with Maggie—until Florian, his second wife, and their two children are all killed in a plane crash, and she’s left even more alone. Phoning Maggie from her exclusive boarding school, she asks if she can come live with the mother her father had spent years turning her against. Maggie is over the moon, and her husband, pediatric allergist Noah Alderman, is scarcely less excited. Anna, on her arrival, pronounces her new home perfect and Caleb, the newfound 10-year-old stepbrother whose apraxia makes him slow of speech, adorable. But her storybook homecoming is already curdled, for the opening scene shows Noah on trial for strangling Anna to death in response to her complaints that he’s been coming on to her, the injunction she’s filed against him, and his bewildered uprooting from his own home. Cutting dexterously back and forth between the events leading up to Anna’s murder and the trial that will determine Noah’s innocence or guilt, Scottoline makes things even more complicated by presenting the major events of the trial in reverse order just because she can.
The result is a nail-biting thriller but a terrible mystery, with the third-act jitters so frequently in evidence in the author’s earlier work running amok as they spin out a series of improbable complications, a barrage of shameless cliffhangers, and a culprit ex machina before the absurdly happy ending.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-09965-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
A formulaic thriller that ranks with Quirk's lesser efforts.
Former Secret Service man Nick Averose becomes a pawn in a deadly political conspiracy in the nation's capital when he is framed for the murder of a former CIA director.
Twenty-five years ago, a young woman was found dead at a summer gathering attended by future senator and current presidential hopeful Sam MacDonough. The wealthy power broker looking to plant him in the White House will do anything to keep secret what happened that night. A month before the killing of the CIA director, a one-time flame of Nick's who had been at that summer party came to him seeking protection and then disappeared with her secrets. Nick, who, as part of his two-person security business, stages mock home invasions for potential targets to identify potential security weaknesses, escapes the scene of the CIA director's killing but not the crosshairs of the killers. Nick holds them off with the help of his trusty female tech assistant and a one-time Marine buddy who is now a successful contractor in Washington. Quirk is good at describing fancy trappings. A rich man's suit boasts "Milanese stitches and a silk latch hidden behind the lapel." Another fat cat drinks Dujac premier cru, a French pinot noir. But the characters themselves are lacking in the details and dimensions that would make them interesting. And the plot, usually the strong point for the author of The Night Agent (2019), is predictable.
A formulaic thriller that ranks with Quirk's lesser efforts.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-287549-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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