Klingler (Rats, 2014) offers a techno-thriller about digital music piracy and the people it affects most.
Detective Qigiq is visiting San Francisco to help investigate a crime that’s a bit more modern than those in his native rural Alaska. He’s partnered with Detective Kandy Dreeson to investigate a box containing severed fingers that Robina, a music student, received in the mail. The digits are sealed in a plastic bag with a sticker reading, “Don't Steal Music.” Robina says the fingers belong to her roommate, Sally Bellowi, a cellist in the string quartet Fourtunate. In their quest to find the missing Sally, the detectives investigate her many lovers, including a music professor, a rock guitarist, and a man called “Mony,” among others. Elsewhere, in northern California, Eddy Blake, the CEO of a company called Silver Platter, struggles to successfully launch Invisible Hand—software that can scan a computer for illegally downloaded music and then frighten or embarrass the “file-sharer” into never doing so again. Just as he prepares to release it onto the Internet, YouTube footage appears of Sally, his ex-lover—gagged, terrified and likely being raped. Qigiq and Kandy fear that Sally’s kidnapper will finish her off and then choose a new victim. Klingler makes supreme use of his tech knowledge in a grisly mystery that strives to address the ethics of content ownership. His effortlessly clever prose makes the subject thoroughly entertaining, as in a line describing a lawyer as “so uptight he squeaked coming through the door.” The author’s awe of musicians is also apparent: “She played...faster and harder, louder, two notes at a time, the energy filling his ears, her raw beauty filling his eyes.” Unfortunately, for every instance of such respect, there are several that highlight the book’s guys-only tone, in which women are casually objectified: “Eddy…watched as the kid couldn’t resist the opportunity to twist his big neck around and ogle Alicia’s rear as he passed….Eddy didn’t much care if the kid looked, he was just jealous he wasn’t getting that view.” Readers may be surprised to see such a thoughtful, well-constructed tale lower itself to keep certain readers’ attention.
A smart but indulgently sexual thriller.
Pub Date: March 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1941156032
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Cartosi LLC
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
