The closest models for this sprawling, ambitious debut are gangster movies from Scarface to Mesrine.
Three small-timers claw their way to the top of Stockholm’s vast cocaine empire, with predictably mixed results.
Chilean drug dealer Jorge Salinas Barrio sees no reason why he should serve out his jail time. Mrado Slovovic, the Yugoslavian chief of the city’s coat-check protection racket, is hungry for bigger things. Johan Westlund, an impoverished party boy, is plucked from obscurity by Abdulkarim Haij, who thinks he can sell drugs to his better-heeled friends. Once Jorge breaks out of prison, the places he and the other two ill-assorted heroes assume in crime boss Radovan Kranjic’s establishment change their dreams into ceaseless scheming. Since extortion, prostitution, drug smuggling and money laundering are something of a zero-sum game, each player can reach the top only by bringing down someone else. And even before Jorge, Mrado and JW become aware of each others’ existence, that’s exactly what they attempt. There are complications, of course. Mrado keeps fighting his ex-wife’s attempts to deny his joint custody of their daughter. The higher JW rises in the hierarchy, the more intently he searches for clues to the disappearance of his sister Camilla four years ago. Jorge, saved from death by JW’s offhanded intervention, swears eternal loyalty to him, even though eternal loyalty is unlikely to be rewarded. The rat-a-tat-tat rhythms of Lapidus’ prose, in Ahlander’s translation, aren’t for everyone. Yet the first-time novelist, an attorney who’s defended some of the most notorious figures in Sweden’s underworld, creates a magnetically rich, murky man’s world in which women are mostly chattel, the police remain mostly offstage and nothing is ever personal, just business. Inevitably, however, it’s their personal ties and quests that most endanger Jorge, Mrado and JW.
The closest models for this sprawling, ambitious debut are gangster movies from Scarface to Mesrine.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-37748-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Short chapters, paragraphs, and sentences; stilted dialogue; facile plotting; a few feeble passes at description: a...
Schematic and pedestrian, Patterson’s latest (after The Beach House, p. 519) pits Alex Cross against a trio of serial killers.
If only Alex Cross (last seen in Violets Are Blue, 200l) could retire from the Washington Police Force, as he wants to when he first appears here, having breakfast with his family. Alas, Cross’s friend John Sampson entreats the detective to take one more case, and a desultory pursuit ensues. Sampson believes the conviction of his friend, ’Nam vet Ellis Cooper, for the brutal murder of three women resulted from a frame-up. Patterson’s quick (what else?) crosscut to the killers bears Sampson out. Calling themselves “the three blind mice,” the men are hired killers unaware of the identity and motives of their employer, who, presumably, is the fourth mouse of the title. With “the clock for Ellis Cooper . . . ticking so loud,” Cross and Sampson search in vain for evidence to clear him before he is executed. The Army’s indifference to evidence that clears Cooper and points to other suspects bluntly suggests a cover-up. Then, crimes similar to the ones Copper allegedly committed follow: the three killers slaughter their victims, paint them red, and leave a straw doll at the scene of the carnage. E-mails from someone called “Foot Soldier” lead Cross to the solution, which, as Patterson makes obvious, stems from atrocities the military committed in Vietnam. Some feel-good domestic scenes (Cross’s grandma survives heart surgery) and a few hackneyed romantic interludes for Cross and Sampson break up the chase. At the closeout, the killers dispatched, Cross is planning to go to work for the FBI, suggesting a new tack for the series.
Short chapters, paragraphs, and sentences; stilted dialogue; facile plotting; a few feeble passes at description: a Patterson blue-plate special.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-69300-6
Page Count: 28
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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