An all-too-familiar plot and banal writing.
A former soldier tracks a psychotic serial killer in this crime drama.
Alexei Lupescu was born in Romania and abandoned at an orphanage. He was adopted by an American family and taken to Charlotte, North Carolina, to start a new life. Soon Alexei shows signs of both intellectual precociousness and psychological abnormality—he has a genius level IQ but a chilling lack of empathy for others. Dr. Hargrave, a renowned psychiatrist, examines 8-year-old Alexei and predicts he will eventually become a sexual predator as well as a serial killer—a peculiarly specific prognostication issued with self-confidence. At 10, the boy runs away from home to live on the “ragged edge of society.” By 16, he’s a major figure in the Charlotte underworld. As Hargrave foretold, he does transform into an unrepentant murderer, but he’s nearly impossible to catch. He comes to be known as “The Chameleon Killer,” an unimaginative moniker typical of the novel’s sterile prose that ranges from the blandly declarative to the melodramatic. Maj. Clive Cooper, a former elite solider now working for the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, nicknamed by his peers the “Hunter Killer,” is tasked with tracking Alexei. There is no shortage of stories about serial killers and their pursuers in literature and popular culture in general, and Howard contributes nothing new or fresh to the genre. Furthermore, the story is needlessly implausible as well—Alexei’s “psychopathy was expanding and allowed him, by an unknown cerebral mechanism, to process everyday experiences at an accelerated rate.” This short novel is little more than the tedious regurgitation of shopworn fictional formulas. Still, the plot is briskly paced, and there is plenty of dramatic action.
An all-too-familiar plot and banal writing.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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