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
PROFILES
IN THE NEWS
With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it’s almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.
A young Philadelphia policewoman searches for her addicted sister on the streets.
The title of Moore’s (The Unseen World, 2016, etc.) fourth novel refers to “a long bright river of departed souls,” the souls of people dead from opioid overdoses in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington. The book opens with a long paragraph that's just a list of names, most of whom don’t have a role in the plot, but the last two entries are key: “Our mother. Our father.” As the novel opens, narrator Mickey Fitzpatrick—a bright but emotionally damaged single mom—is responding with her partner to a call. A dead girl has turned up in an abandoned train yard frequented by junkies. Mickey is terrified that it will be her estranged sister, Kacey, whom she hasn’t seen in a while. The two were raised by their grandmother, a cold, bitter woman who never recovered from the overdose death of the girls' mother. Mickey herself is awkward and tense in all social situations; when she talks about her childhood she mentions watching the other kids from the window, trying to memorize their mannerisms so she could “steal them and use them [her]self.” She is close with no one except her 4-year-old son, Thomas, whom she barely sees because she works so much, leaving him with an unenthusiastic babysitter. Opioid abuse per se is not the focus of the action—the book centers on the search for Kacey. Obsessed with the possibility that her sister will end up dead before she can find her, Mickey breaches protocol and makes a series of impulsive decisions that get her in trouble. The pace is frustratingly slow for most of the book, then picks up with a flurry of revelations and developments toward the end, bringing characters onstage we don’t have enough time to get to know. The narrator of this atmospheric crime novel has every reason to be difficult and guarded, but the reader may find her no easier to bond with than the other characters do.
With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it’s almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-54067-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.
The master of modern horror returns with a loose-knit parapsychological thriller that touches on territory previously explored in Firestarter and Carrie.
Tim Jamieson is a man emphatically not in a hurry. As King’s (The Outsider, 2018, etc.) latest opens, he’s bargaining with a flight attendant to sell his seat on an overbooked run from Tampa to New York. His pockets full, he sticks out his thumb and winds up in the backwater South Carolina town of DuPray (should we hear echoes of “pray”? Or “depraved”?). Turns out he’s a decorated cop, good at his job and at reading others (“You ought to go see Doc Roper,” he tells a local. “There are pills that will brighten your attitude”). Shift the scene to Minneapolis, where young Luke Ellis, precociously brilliant, has been kidnapped by a crack extraction team, his parents brutally murdered so that it looks as if he did it. Luke is spirited off to Maine—this is King, so it’s got to be Maine—and a secret shadow-government lab where similarly conscripted paranormally blessed kids, psychokinetic and telepathic, are made to endure the Skinnerian pain-and-reward methods of the evil Mrs. Sigsby. How to bring the stories of Tim and Luke together? King has never minded detours into the unlikely, but for this one, disbelief must be extra-willingly suspended. In the end, their forces joined, the two and their redneck allies battle the sophisticated secret agents of The Institute in a bloodbath of flying bullets and beams of mental energy (“You’re in the south now, Annie had told these gunned-up interlopers. She had an idea they were about to find out just how true that was"). It’s not King at his best, but he plays on current themes of conspiracy theory, child abuse, the occult, and Deep State malevolence while getting in digs at the current occupant of the White House, to say nothing of shadowy evil masterminds with lisps.
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-1056-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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