Houston comes across as a haven of multiculturalism—though, as in all the 90-plus volumes of Akashic’s 15-year-old series,...
Editor Zepeda departs from her usual diet of brightly bilingual children’s books (Maya and Annie on Saturdays and Sundays/Los Sábados y Domingos de Maya y Annie, 2018, etc.) to present 14 reasons to avoid visiting Houston, or to be sorry that you live there.
Zepeda’s not kidding when she says the newly commissioned stories “hurt me. They burned.” There’s precious little comfort to be found in any of these Houston neighborhoods, most of which are set light-years away from the city’s notoriously cushy new-money culture. No less than four stories—Tom Abrahams’s “Tolerance,” Pia Pico’s “The Falls of Westpark,” Sehba Sarwar’s “Railway Track,” and Icess Fernandez Rojas’ “Happy Hunting,” whose combination of creeps and surprises makes it the volume’s low-life high point—feature serial killings of young women. The naïve young hero of Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton’s “Where the Ends Meet” and the almost equally naïve cop hero of Leslie Contreras Schwartz’s “City of Girls” find that the girls in question have merely been sexually enslaved, not murdered, and Robert Boswell’s alarmingly kicky “The Use of Landscape” dials back the violence by focusing it on only a single woman. The traffic in drugs creates intimate tragedies in Wanjiku Wa Ngugi’s “Miles’s Blues” and Stephanie Jaye Evans’ “Jamie’s Mother.” Even when professional criminals aren’t involved, the squalor associated with them infects the one-off murders of Larry Watts’ “A Dark Universe” and Adrienne Perry’s “One in the Family” and the domestic dramas of Sarah Cortez’s prose poem, “Photo Album,” and Anton DiSclafani’s “Tangled.” So it’s something of a relief to turn to Reyes Ramirez’s “Xitlali Zaragoza, Curandera,” which involves nothing more sinister than the curse professionally unmasked and lifted by a dedicated investigator of hauntings.
Houston comes across as a haven of multiculturalism—though, as in all the 90-plus volumes of Akashic’s 15-year-old series, the vision of the city that emerges isn’t likely to jump-start tourism for any but the most ghoulishly inclined.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61775-706-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
