Well done overall. A pleasurable, complex read that runs a touch long—and, as Giltrow reminds us, “It is all about distance.”
A literate though gritty thriller by Oxford-based mysterian Giltrow.
Who guards the guards while they’re guarding the rest of us? So asked the Roman poet Juvenal. Giltrow offers a wrinkle: If the guards are criminals to begin with, top dogs in a “self-regulating society made up of other criminals,” then who are the criminals, and why bother guarding them? No matter: She ably imagines a near-future republic of miscreants that exists alongside our own. The Program, as it’s called, is impregnable—supposedly. Populated by the dregs of society—supposedly—it allows no entry or exit. That’s before elegant socialite Charlotte Alton goes all Batman, of course, and in her alter ego as the tough sociopath Karla, helps insinuate the even tougher sniper and spook-on-the-run Simon Johanssen into a place run by an archfiend who’s tougher still, a “professional criminal, gangster, murderer” who wants Simon dead. Now, why would Simon, who certainly takes his lumps in this tale, want to go to such an uninviting place? Apparently, because some sniper justice needs to be visited on a woman who has done Very Bad Things, a sentiment that seems to be widely shared. But hasn’t everyone in The Program done such VBTs? Well, there’s the question. The cat and mouse that ensues is satisfying though not without flaws: Giltrow’s characters can’t stop gabbing, the narrative suffers from occasional patches of overwriting (“But my brain won’t let me sleep: I lie there while the thoughts tick in my head, metronomic, insistent, like the drip of a tap”), and it stretches credulity and patience for everyone in the story to nurse a secret-life back story. Still, Giltrow’s villains are just right (who doesn’t hate medical insurers, for one thing?), and the worldbuilding she does in imagining The Program to begin with is worthy of a well-made sci-fi yarn, pushing genre bounds in interesting ways.
Well done overall. A pleasurable, complex read that runs a touch long—and, as Giltrow reminds us, “It is all about distance.”Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-53699-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
Thin characters, fat plot-holes, sluggish pacing and Cussler’s signature clunky prose.
The smartest shamus on earth tracks the planet’s cleverest lowlife in the latest to roll from the Cussler assembly line (Polar Shift, 2005, etc.).
In 1906, they didn’t come any nastier than the Butcher Bandit, who, when the book opens, has already racked up 38 kills, a goodly number of them women and children. He robs banks, murdering—remorselessly—any unfortunate who happens to be on the premises at the time. So adept at the work is he, we’re told exhaustively, that he’s commonly believed to be uncatchable. Which is why Isaac (“He always gets his man”) Bell of the Van Dorn Detective Agency is assigned the case. But the Butcher Bandit is a slippery one indeed. Not only brilliant, audacious and cold-blooded beyond measure, he is also not the stuff of which bottom-feeders are usually made. For it turns out that the master criminal who has robbed banks all over the Southwest is actually a bank president himself. In San Francisco, the extremely solvent Cromwell Bank is a byword for respectability, its founder and chief executive a pillar of the community. That would be Jacob Cromwell, aka the much sought after Butcher Bandit. So how to explain Cromwell’s deep, dark plunge into criminality? He loves the challenge, he says. There’s also that new word, Bell explains to an understandably puzzled colleague, that psychology professionals are beginning to use: sociopath. At any rate, the game’s afoot, the antagonists perfectly matched, with Cromwell convinced he can rob, kill and elude capture, and Bell promising not to rest “until I capture the man responsible for these hideous crimes.”
Thin characters, fat plot-holes, sluggish pacing and Cussler’s signature clunky prose.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-15438-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
Locke, having stockpiled an acclaimed array of crime novels (Pleasantville, 2015, etc.), deserves a career breakthrough for...
What appears at first to be a double hate crime in a tiny Texas town turns out to be much more complicated—and more painful—than it seems.
With a degree from Princeton and two years of law school under his belt, Darren Mathews could have easily taken his place among the elite of African-American attorneys. Instead, he followed his uncle’s lead to become a Texas Ranger. “What is it about that damn badge?” his estranged wife, Lisa, asks. “It was never intended for you.” Darren often wonders if she’s right but nonetheless finds his badge useful “for working homicides with a racial element—murders with a particularly ugly taint.” The East Texas town of Lark is small enough to drive through “in the time it [takes] to sneeze,” but it’s big enough to have had not one, but two such murders. One of the victims is a black lawyer from Chicago, the kind of crusader-advocate Darren could have been if he’d stayed on his original path; the other is a young white woman, a local resident. Both battered bodies were found in a nearby bayou. His job already jeopardized by his role in a race-related murder case in another part of the state, Darren eases his way into Lark, where even his presence is enough to raise hackles among both the town’s white and black residents; some of the latter, especially, seem reluctant and evasive in their conversations with him. Besides their mysterious resistance, Darren also has to deal with a hostile sheriff, the white supremacist husband of the dead woman, and the dead lawyer’s moody widow, who flies into town with her own worst suspicions as to what her husband was doing down there. All the easily available facts imply some sordid business that could cause the whole town to explode. But the deeper Darren digs into the case, encountering lives steeped in his home state’s musical and social history, the more he begins to distrust his professional—and personal—instincts.
Locke, having stockpiled an acclaimed array of crime novels (Pleasantville, 2015, etc.), deserves a career breakthrough for this deftly plotted whodunit whose writing pulses throughout with a raw, blues-inflected lyricism.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-36329-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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