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Mays Landing

Name: Mays Landing
Author: J.C. Mercer

by J.C. Mercer ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 2016

An intriguing tale of a homeless drifter hoping to reinvent his life.

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A suicidal young man decides to settle in New York’s subway tunnels with a band of vagrants.

In Mercer’s debut novel, Mays, a medical school dropout, finds himself homeless and broke after a failed suicide attempt. At the hospital, he meets Thomas “T-Bone” Bonicelli, who offers to help him escape without drawing the attention of the nurses. The two meet later at Saint Christopher All Souls Kitchen. After T-Bone finds out about Mays’ financial problems, he tells him, “We can’t have you walking around with no money like you’re some kinda bum on the street.” T-Bone earns cash by participating in “clinical trials in the pharmaceutical industry” and medical experiments. After T-Bone invites Mays to live in the “Bat Cave,” his underground home beneath the subway tunnels, Mays come to think of his new companion as a “surrogate quasi-father figure” and discovers that he has “something that had been missing for quite some time: a future.” Mays and T-Bone have their farts tested at a “clinical exercise testing facility,” become prostate exam test subjects for third-year medical students, and even sell their sperm on a weekly basis to avoid becoming destitute. Though Mercer doesn’t ever clearly state his main character’s motivations—why does he decide to trust T-Bone and go along with his schemes?—his strange tale of two men living off the grid is a fresh and vividly rendered take on the alternate lifestyle trope. Some readers may be put off by the author’s light treatment of mental illness and suicide—in one disturbing section, Mays considers all the ways he might try killing himself again—but Mercer’s goal seems to be to push boundaries past the acceptable and into the grotesque. Mays’ quest to find meaning should be familiar to those struggling to find direction in their own lives, but that may not be a good enough reason for readers to stick around for a character whose path and purpose seem to remain mysterious even to the author.

An intriguing tale of a homeless drifter hoping to reinvent his life.

Pub Date: March 28, 2016

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 282

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: June 27, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BONE CODE
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
TWO NIGHTS
by Kathy Reichs

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

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Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.