A crime story sunk by unbelievability and the weight of its cliches.
In Ollman’s thriller, an unusual private detective helps a felonious young couple on the run from white supremacists and the law.
Gerald Hodges is the strangest of characters—a “sixtyish man” diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, he’s a fugitive from the law for committing murder and “heinous crimes in the name of love,” a vague and confusing description typical of the author’s awkward writing style. Gerald changes his name to Oliver Payne and establishes a business assisting those in any kind of trouble; the premise is so formulaically derivative of the movie The Equalizer that one of his clients points out the similarity. Money is no object to Payne—he has access to “unlimited funds” as a result of the generosity of his ex-wife, Lucille. One day, Payne notices a striking photograph in the newspaper of a young couple locked in an amorous embrace amid a violent riot and decides he must meet them. With the help of his business partner and trainer, Madison Dupree, a young woman “talented in the arts of war,” he tracks down the couple in the photograph—Connie and his girlfriend, Natalie—who are in desperate need of help. The pair robbed a bank, making off with millions in securities, but they enlisted the help of Nazi white supremacists to pull off the heist, a wildly implausible story that Ollman fails to render credibly. The couple claim to regret their crime and want to return the money while evading both criminal prosecution and the Nazis hunting them. The novel certainly delivers a lot of action at a frenetic pace; the plot never slows down to catch its breath as it races to a violent conclusion. Unfortunately, the story feels as hopelessly contrived as it does melodramatic. While the author goes to great lengths to sketch backstories for his principal cast, none of them qualify as fully realized characters, least of all Payne, who reeks of laborious literary invention. As a result, the novel is a challenge to finish despite its surfeit of drama.
A crime story sunk by unbelievability and the weight of its cliches.Pub Date: May 20, 2022
ISBN: 9798449176219
Page Count: 211
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.
A series of mounting complications leads to yet another fight to the death between the discarded intelligence agents of Slough House and the morally bankrupt head of MI5.
As Jackson Lamb’s motley crew on Aldersgate Street struggles to cope with the deaths of River Cartwright’s grandfather and mentor, intelligence veteran David Cartwright, and their dim, beloved colleague Min Harper, new troubles are brewing. Diana Taverner, who runs the British Intelligence Service from Regent’s Park, is being blackmailed by former MP Peter Judd to do his bidding. Nothing untoward about that, of course, but this time, Judd’s demands, backed by a compromising tape recording, are more pressing than usual. So Diana reconvenes the Brains Trust—Al Hawke, Avril Potts, Daisy Wessex, and their ex-boss Charles Cornell Stamoran—whose last assignment was to serve as the contact for psychopathic IRA informant Dougie Malone while turning a blind eye to his multiple rapes and murders, which were really none of the Crown’s business. Taverner’s new assignment for the Brains Trust is the assassination of Judd. Since all these developments are filtered through the riotously cynical lens of Herron’s imagination, nothing goes as planned, and when the smoke clears, the fatalities don’t include Judd. Now that Judd knows he has as much reason to fear Taverner as she does to fear him, Lamb offers to broker a peace meeting between them which Slough House computer geek Roddy Ho will keep secret by knocking out 37 security cameras around Taverner’s dwelling. What could possibly go wrong?
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781641297264
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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