Wacky, worldly Wagstaff is a winner.
Berkin’s (Cut to Wagstaff, 2012) second Wagstaff adventure pits his protagonist against the Rhode Island mob.
En route to a reunion at Brown University, Wagstaff stops in Las Vegas, where he thwarts a carjacking and saves Alfie Palumbo’s life. Alfie is the son of a Mafia chief from Rhode Island, but he’s no hoodlum; he’s an upstanding art historian who happens to have a disreputable dad. Nor is Wagstaff an ordinary good Samaritan; he freelances as an investigator for a mysterious, “off-the-books” intelligence agency. Key to his success is his faith in “Jungian synchronicities”; in other words, he doesn’t believe in coincidence. Instead, he filters occurrences through his encyclopedic knowledge of film. For example, if something reminds him of a movie, he overlays that film’s plot on what’s actually taking place—then his brain fizzes into action, making unusual connections. When he realizes that Alfie is one of the same Palumbos who ran his own hometown, he decides to find out who’s behind the attempted murder. The Palumbo family is thrilled by this, and they provide him with a bodyguard and other assistance—but can they be trusted? Central to the mystery are a lost Caravaggio painting that Alfie uncovered in an Italian monastery and an art heist from the 1980s. But when a local man winds up dead in a dumpster, Wagstaff worries that he could be next. High-spirited, high-stakes mayhem fills every page; there are nonstop scrapes and chases, wise-guy jokes, and references to everything from The Gong Show to Star Trek, The Godfather, and even the 1990 film The Freshman. Berkin’s story is preposterous and his leading man improbable—but the novel’s endearing goofiness makes this a winning combination. Film buffs will love spotting the various movie references (and Wagstaff’s disquisition on Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window), while action fans will find plenty here to raise their heart rates. Readers shouldn’t read this book while hungry, though, as Wagstaff’s most intense nostalgia is for Rhode Island cuisine—all described in detail that will leave readers drooling.
Wacky, worldly Wagstaff is a winner.Pub Date: April 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5442-0056-9
Page Count: 308
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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