The big buildup leads to the big letdown.
A thriller that promises something new ends up delivering something old.
Arnott (He Kills Coppers, 2002, etc.) gives readers every reason to expect an exciting ramble through London’s mean streets. As he’s shown before, he has a deft touch with postmodern noir, his plotting is intricate, his views appropriately existential, his characters ambitious and ambiguous. With nary a whiff of pretense, he also makes bright allusions, subtle and direct, in this case to Orwell, Brecht, R.L. Stevenson, and, of course, Dashiell Hammett. Arnott works several plot lines. The first and eventually dominant thread follows self-loathing crime writer Tony Meehan as he extracts details from the life of ex-con Eddie Doyle, whose biography Meehan is ghostwriting. At a funeral, a glimpse of mobster Harry Starks jolts Doyle. The two had been part of a bullion heist in which Starks cut Doyle from a share of the take, and now Doyle wants what’s his. Like Doyle, Julie McClusky, the center of a second thread, wants revenge, in her case for the rubout of her gangland father. An actress, Julie eventually realizes the best means to this end is to back the film her boyfriend wants to make about the London mob. Research on the film will give her a cover to track her father’s killer—the movie’s the thing wherein she’ll catch the leader of the ring. Arnott moves ahead swiftly, getting off some good lines, but, though drawn rather well, the characters and their scenes lack edge and surprise. When actors playing cons and cons playing actors move onto the film set for the final confrontation, a sinking feeling sets in as the too-familiar significance of the title’s merged words becomes clear: art often blurs with reality, though the latter, however haphazard, is what you’re left with.
The big buildup leads to the big letdown.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-56947-373-0
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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