A profane, slangy, ludicrously violent ``roller punk'' thriller that's as uneven as the slippery San Francisco streets, sewers, and cyberspace it revels in. With a tattoo of Ralph Waldo Emerson on one shoulder and a boa constrictor in his parlor, Chet Griffin is a sex-starved slacker addicted to sugar highs and the heartstopping adrenalin thrills derived from sleepless nights of computer hacking and restless days as the city's only in-line skating message courier. His low-paying, high-anxiety job helps him forget his crack-addicted tattoo-artist younger brother Bobby, his dead parents, his supersuccessful, wheelchair-bound, software-genius roommate Denny, and their bass-playing lesbian skateboard punk queen chum, Ho Chi Minh Pixie, with whom Griffin is hopelessly infatuated. When first-novelist Quirk stays on the street with his breezily insouciant cast of postmodern, fin-de-siäcle bohemians, his narrative sputters along with hilariously manic Hunter Thompsonlike word-spray. But, alas, the plot must thicken: Griffin's sleazy boss, Mel Corlini (his sister is an equally sleazy police lieutenant), starts paying him under the table to run computer discs between a prestigious investment- banking firm and a group of Chinese and Italian crack smugglers. Griffin asks no questions until a fellow courier is gunned down in the financial district by a platoon of Armani-clad hoodlums named after Star Trek characters. Griffin's own escape is followed by a absurd rooftop-to-BART-stopchase, the first of many minutely choreographed cinematic action scenes wholly lacking in menace. A kinky romance blossoms between Griffin and Ho as Griffin applies his hacker skills in playing far too many bad guys (including a sadistic cyber-smasher named MP Phred) against one another. Newcomer Quirk's feverish plotting runs away with an otherwise funny, stylish tale of overeducated, underappreciated, urban bottom-dwellers using youthful stamina and high-tech toys to befuddle a dull, grown-up world. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-15270-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
The two sisters who write as Constantine (The Last Mrs. Parrish, 2017) can do better than this.
"Baltimore Heiress Bludgeoned to Death in Her Home"—and now the killer is after the dead woman's daughter.
"Only days ago, Kate had been mulling over what to get her mother for Christmas. She couldn't have known that instead of choosing a gift, she'd be picking out her casket." Unfortunately, things are about to get much worse. Immediately after the funeral, Kate receives a text. "You think you're sad now, just wait. By the time I’m finished with you, you'll wish you had been buried today." That same night, she finds three mice in her bathroom sink with their eyes gouged out, accompanied by another alarming message. "They all ran after a charming life / he took their eyes with a carving knife / Did you ever see such a beautiful sight / As three dead mice." Kate and her semi-estranged husband, Simon, hire round-the-clock security guards, since one thing these people have is plenty of money. Also Ivy League degrees, designer clothes, a nanny, a cook, a beach house, a foundation, and big, successful careers. Simon is an architect, and Kate is a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon, or at least she's supposed to be—there's not a single detail that makes this feel believable, unless "she’d worked her butt off to get into med school and to ace the MCATs" counts. Maybe complaints about the money-porn aspect of the book seem picky, but the whodunit aspect, which is where it lives or dies, is not much more substantial. Suspicious details pile up so quickly against the various suspects that one never actually suspects them, and then so much backstory has to be shoehorned in at the last minute to support the solution to the puzzle that it's not very satisfying.
The two sisters who write as Constantine (The Last Mrs. Parrish, 2017) can do better than this.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-286881-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The plot is absurd, of course, but the book is a definitive pleasure. Prepare to be absorbed—and in more ways than one.
Another Brown (Inferno, 2013, etc.) blockbuster, blending arcana, religion, and skulduggery—sound familiar?—with the latest headlines.
You just have to know that when the first character you meet in a Brown novel is a debonair tech mogul and the second a bony-fingered old bishop, you’ll end up with a clash of ideologies and worldviews. So it is. Edmond Kirsch, once a student of longtime Brown hero Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist–turned–action hero, has assembled a massive crowd, virtual and real, in Bilbao to announce he’s discovered something that’s destined to kill off religion and replace it with science. It would be ungallant to reveal just what the discovery is, but suffice it to say that the religious leaders of the world are in a tizzy about it, whereupon one shadowy Knights of Malta type takes it upon himself to put a bloody end to Kirsch’s nascent heresy. Ah, but what if Kirsch had concocted an AI agent so powerful that his own death was just an inconvenience? What if it was time for not just schism, but singularity? Digging into the mystery, Langdon finds a couple of new pals, one of them that computer avatar, and a whole pack of new enemies, who, not content just to keep Kirsch’s discovery under wraps, also frown on the thought that a great many people in the modern world, including some extremely prominent Spaniards, find fascism and Falangism passé and think the reigning liberal pope is a pretty good guy. Yes, Franco is still dead, as are Christopher Hitchens, Julian Jaynes, Jacques Derrida, William Blake, and other cultural figures Brown enlists along the way—and that’s just the beginning of the body count. The old ham-fisted Brown is here in full glory (“In that instant, Langdon realized that perhaps there was a macabre silver lining to Edmond’s horrific murder”; “The vivacious, strong-minded beauty had turned Julián’s world upside down”)—but, for all his defects as a stylist, it can’t be denied that he knows how to spin a yarn, and most satisfyingly.
The plot is absurd, of course, but the book is a definitive pleasure. Prepare to be absorbed—and in more ways than one.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-51423-1
Page Count: 461
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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