A winning tale of music, technology, and femme fatales.
In this modern noir, a man sets out to discover himself on a road trip only to become mixed up with counterfeiters.
Tommy Kelsey, a mechanic from Gates Mills, Ohio, has just turned 29. After a night of blowout celebration, he realizes that his life is nothing but a quagmire of texting and wasted potential. Impulsively, he hops in his restored 1965 Plymouth Barracuda, packing some mystery novels and his guitar, and drives west. He also tosses his smartphone out the car window—job and relationships be damned. At a Big Boy restaurant, he meets a beautiful, redheaded hitchhiker named Mona. He drives with her to Chicago, agreeing to be her private investigator for three days. She pays him $600 cash from her tightly clutched backpack, and they check into a hotel. In the morning, Mona is gone, and he finds her backpack shoved under the hood of his car. Inside the pack is her phone, a note from Mona asking him to find her, and $500,000. Now Tommy must hone some genuine PI skills if he’s to survive a city known as much for its astonishing murder rate as its blues music. He finds Mona dancing at the Pink Monkey club—but she doesn’t recognize him at all. Klingler (Rats, 2014, etc.) presents his craftiest yarn to date, summoning the pulpy spirits of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. The setting of Chicago rattles from the page in lines such as, “The buildings held noise and exhaust fumes around me like a torture chamber.” The author populates his narrative with ingénues (Lizz the librarian, Penny the criminology major, Tracy the groupie) whose engines Tommy easily revs; they also help him with his investigation until he finally starts getting somewhere on his own. Klingler carefully shades in the connections between a murder in an underground Detroit cemetery, a counterfeiting operation, and the hitchhiker with a short memory. Although the final third wanders a bit with Tommy moonlighting as a blues guitarist, the finale offers a thrilling portrait of citywide corruption.
A winning tale of music, technology, and femme fatales.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941156-05-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Cartosi LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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