A dense, inventive, challenging account of one woman’s bizarre West Coast entanglement.
A literary novel about one woman’s strange journey through Northern California.
Mason (Sebastopol, 2009) presents Elizabeth Cromwell, a professional dominatrix in San Francisco. Elizabeth is in attendance at a party during gay pride week hosted by the XX Lite Lash Society when she comes across a man named Geoffrey Godwin Dilworth. Geoff has a strange story to tell. It seems that he had a negative encounter with a dominant named Prescott. Prescott left Geoff tied up at a hotel called Tor’s Lake, with certain parts of his body painted in nail polish, and then proceeded to call Geoff’s wife. After Geoff begins referring to himself as Lance (and referring to Geoff as his “weak sister”), it’s clear that things are even odder than they first appear. Two weeks after Elizabeth’s encounter with Geoff, she is made aware that he is attempting to give her a comic-book collection valued at some quarter-million dollars. By this point, Geoff has disappeared, and Elizabeth isn’t quite sure she wants the collection, seeing how Geoff gave her “the creeps.” When Elizabeth attempts to speak with a lawyer named Sheila Prescott, an explosion outside of San Francisco’s Civic Center kills and wounds a number of people. Elizabeth comes away with only minor injuries and a blind man’s service dog. She decides that she will attempt to find the dog’s owner. It’s a mission that only adds to her convoluted journey through California towns like Vacaville and Petaluma. It is a journey that will come to involve ever stranger elements like a burned down comic-book store, a photograph of a mysterious railroad car, and a lengthy tangent on F. Scott Fitzgerald. Mason’s winding, Pynchon-esque California adventure is, in the tradition of Pynchon, sometimes difficult to follow. Although conversations tend to consist of questions and answers, they often produce more of the former than the latter. When Elizabeth asks an attorney how long Geoff’s parents were separated, the response is: “Before Melissa was born. Anne was born in San Francisco.” It’s an opaque exchange even when read in the context of the scene, not to mention the fact that it entirely ignores Elizabeth’s inquiry. Although recaps of events do occur (e.g. Elizabeth’s attempts to find the owner of the service dog are explained), the reader can expect little in the way of hand-holding. This isn’t to say the text is inscrutable, only that close reading is necessary. The payoff comes in poetic descriptions such as an “underground campground of the mad” and a visitor’s lounge with “a dozen old people with nothing to move for.” All told the story feels much longer than its nearly 400 pages, though the reader can expect the adventure of a sleuthing sadomasochist professional to prove to be every bit as odd as it sounds.
A dense, inventive, challenging account of one woman’s bizarre West Coast entanglement.Pub Date: April 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4808-1757-9
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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