An entertaining suspense tale that plays celebrity mythology against reality in intriguing ways.
Rocker Lou Reed emerges from the doldrums by investigating a killing that may implicate Andy Warhol’s Factory scene in this mordant murder mystery.
Gomez spins his novel around a real-life low point in the rock god’s career after he quit the Velvet Underground in 1970. Reed worked as a typist for $40 a week at his dad Sidney’s accounting firm on Long Island, an unfathomable plunge into banality from the musician’s former place in the glam Manhattan demimonde swirling around his mentor Andy Warhol. In this mystery, Lou discovers that Sidney is paying to store the possessions, including a Warhol painting, of one Samuel Donato, who was shot to death in 1967. Looking into the incident, Lou learns from Warhol and Factory regulars that he knew Donato even though he has no recollection of it, a common occurrence ever since electroshock treatments in college impaired his memory. Lou is stonewalled by Sidney, and everyone else and gets a beating from a man who’s trying to steal the valuable painting. But the rocker unearths evidence that Donato was pitching a murder-for-art’s-sake scheme to Warhol and may have been killed for it by Lou himself. Much of the fun of Gomez’s tale is the spectacle of Lou, patron saint of wildness, deviancy, and heroin, marooned in his childhood bedroom, seething at Sidney’s lectures and festering in suburbia—“Nothing but car dealerships and department stores. Gas stations and muffler shops. Flat mediocrity everywhere he looks”—after his formation in the crucible of the Factory. (“Drag queens, drugs, cameras filming every moment and Andy, always in the background, making things….Everyone was either creative or crazy and, after you’ve been up for three days on speed, you really couldn’t tell the difference.”) The author’s sly, deadpan prose captures both settings and their denizens in wonderfully evocative detail, especially Warhol’s blend of cool and crass. (“Did you see the retrospective in Pasadena?...It was fabulous. A soup can sold the next day for sixty thousand. Can you believe it?”) As Lou unravels the darker threads of his past, the war for his soul takes surprising and resonant twists. The result is a page-turner that will make Reed’s fans think again about his character.
An entertaining suspense tale that plays celebrity mythology against reality in intriguing ways.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 165
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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