Another tangy Florida thriller from Hall (Bones of Coral, 1991, etc.), this one about long-buried treasure—and murder. Once again, Hall works expertly within the rules of the genre, pitting a misfit hero against fever-dream villains. His new protagonist is Hap Tyler, grandson of one of Miami's founding fathers but no prize, a wenching layabout who carves surfboards when he's not locked up at the local asylum for hearing voices. It's Hap's older brother, Daniel, an archaeologist, who upholds the family name—until Daniel is murdered, which sets Hap against four of Hall's nastiest villains yet. They're Ray Alvarez, a brutal ex- cop; Ray's sidekicks, lifetime loser Glenn Hollings and vicious Martina Phelps—Glenn's remarkably muscular new girlfriend who, Glenn learns to his dismay, used to be named Martin before she ``transgendered'' herself; and, pulling their strings, Senator Garnetta Rawlings. The four are after sunken treasure—treasure that Daniel had been selling to the senator for years, bit by bit. Now Rawlings wants it all, and, when Daniel dies from an overdose of force-fed truth serum, she goes after Hap, who goes after her (in one wry scene, with distilled essence of skunk). Hap cares only about avenging Daniel and preserving his family land; but soon that, too, is threatened when Marguerite, the senator's daughter and Hap's new lover, learns that, due to a legal technicality, she may own all of Miami—including Hap's land—if she can prove that Hap's grandfather killed her grandmother long ago. Some hard violence—a decapitation, shotgunnings, and a hand crisped in a toaster—brings matters to a head, and Hap and Marguerite to fateful choices between greed and honor. A vigorous—even inspired—hoeing of what is, however, old ground (the greedy senator is a particularly hoary bit): still, fans of tropical crime will find pleasures aplenty here.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-385-30797-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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