Less antic than some of its waggish hero’s earlier chronicles but still manically inventive, proudly undisciplined, and...
Isaac Sidel, last seen (Under the Eye of God, 2012) as vice president–elect, becomes president when his top guy is forced to resign. Fireworks ensue, most of them not especially patriotic.
Swept into the second spot and then the top spot by the Slaughter of ’88, Isaac finds himself with a lot less power than when he was the Pink Commish, and later the mayor, of New York. His trusted chief of staff, Brenda Brown, has fled the Beltway madness; her successor, Ramona Dazzle, seems to think keeping her boss in the dark is at the heart of her job description; and there are rumors that Vice President Bull Latham is really running the country. Dazzled by the constant conflicts between everybody and everybody else, Isaac soon realizes that the real power brokers are unelected thugs, financiers, and apparatchiks like Gen. Raymond Tollhouse, head of private-security octopus Wildwater; Baron Pierre de Robespierre, Renata’s Swiss banker; German publishing baron Rainer Wolff; and Viktor Danzig, the tattoo artist dubbed Rembrandt for his flawless counterfeit $50 bills. Counterfeiting indeed provides a radical figure for the action here, although prolific, multitalented Charyn (Jerzy, 2017, etc.) floats enough demotic metaphors within some paragraphs to swamp the nominal action. Isaac, “a clown with a Glock” adrift in a world in which anything can happen to anyone by the end of any sentence, bounces like a bagatelle ball from a school for assassins to the Sons of Rossiya and an uprising at Rikers, where he earns the headline “POTUS TOP COP” before achieving the ultimate Oval Office accolades: Saul Bellow compares him to Isaac’s beloved Augie March, and Danzig tells him that “he was now a registered werewolf.”
Less antic than some of its waggish hero’s earlier chronicles but still manically inventive, proudly undisciplined, and peopled with dark lords and ladies best characterized by wildly inflated epithets—in other words, nothing at all like any presidencies since 1988.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-348-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Locke, having stockpiled an acclaimed array of crime novels (Pleasantville, 2015, etc.), deserves a career breakthrough for...
What appears at first to be a double hate crime in a tiny Texas town turns out to be much more complicated—and more painful—than it seems.
With a degree from Princeton and two years of law school under his belt, Darren Mathews could have easily taken his place among the elite of African-American attorneys. Instead, he followed his uncle’s lead to become a Texas Ranger. “What is it about that damn badge?” his estranged wife, Lisa, asks. “It was never intended for you.” Darren often wonders if she’s right but nonetheless finds his badge useful “for working homicides with a racial element—murders with a particularly ugly taint.” The East Texas town of Lark is small enough to drive through “in the time it [takes] to sneeze,” but it’s big enough to have had not one, but two such murders. One of the victims is a black lawyer from Chicago, the kind of crusader-advocate Darren could have been if he’d stayed on his original path; the other is a young white woman, a local resident. Both battered bodies were found in a nearby bayou. His job already jeopardized by his role in a race-related murder case in another part of the state, Darren eases his way into Lark, where even his presence is enough to raise hackles among both the town’s white and black residents; some of the latter, especially, seem reluctant and evasive in their conversations with him. Besides their mysterious resistance, Darren also has to deal with a hostile sheriff, the white supremacist husband of the dead woman, and the dead lawyer’s moody widow, who flies into town with her own worst suspicions as to what her husband was doing down there. All the easily available facts imply some sordid business that could cause the whole town to explode. But the deeper Darren digs into the case, encountering lives steeped in his home state’s musical and social history, the more he begins to distrust his professional—and personal—instincts.
Locke, having stockpiled an acclaimed array of crime novels (Pleasantville, 2015, etc.), deserves a career breakthrough for this deftly plotted whodunit whose writing pulses throughout with a raw, blues-inflected lyricism.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-36329-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
An exciting, thought-provoking mind-bender.
In Crouch’s sci-fi–driven thriller, a machine designed to help people relive their memories creates apocalyptic consequences.
In 2018, NYPD Detective Barry Sutton unsuccessfully tries to talk Ann Voss Peters off the edge of the Poe Building. She claims to have False Memory Syndrome, a bewildering condition that seems to be spreading. People like Ann have detailed false memories of other lives lived, including marriages and children, but in “shades of gray, like film noir stills.” For some, like Ann, an overwhelming sense of loss leads to suicide. Barry knows loss: Eleven years ago, his 15-year-old daughter, Meghan, was killed by a hit-and-run driver. Details from Ann’s story lead him to dig deeper, and his investigation leads him to a mysterious place called Hotel Memory, where he makes a life-altering discovery. In 2007, a ridiculously wealthy philanthropist and inventor named Marcus Slade offers neuroscientist Helena Smith the chance of a lifetime and an unlimited budget to build a machine that allows people to relive their memories. He says he wants to “change the world.” Helena hopes that her mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, will benefit from her passion project. The opportunity for unfettered research is too tempting to turn down. However, when Slade takes the research in a controversial direction, Helena may have to destroy her dream to save the world. Returning to a few of the themes he explored in Dark Matter (2016), Crouch delivers a bullet-fast narrative and raises the stakes to a fever pitch. A poignant love story is woven in with much food for thought on grief and the nature of memories and how they shape us, rounding out this twisty and terrifying thrill ride.
An exciting, thought-provoking mind-bender.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-5978-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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