A promisingly complex detective story too often sidelined by editorializing.
In DeSain’s (Prometheus Ignored, 2012) latest novel, a corrupt sheriff facing re-election tracks a serial killer in a rural California county where mysterious forces hold sway.
Sheriff Gus has never had to do much to hold his place as the county’s top law enforcement officer. The local party bosses have always told him whom to investigate and when to turn a blind eye, and his compliance has earned him a career’s worth of unopposed elections. But times have changed: The old bosses are all dead or bankrupt, and a recent influx of left-leaning refugees from Los Angeles has given rise to Gus’ first-ever political opponent—a gym-toned, camera-ready young family man named Lance Daniels. Gus’ defeat seems certain until a beautiful young woman is found dead in a local cattle pasture, providing the aging sheriff with a rare chance to prove his mettle through some good old-fashioned police work. But when a second body turns up, Gus must decide to either follow the thread of truth through a dangerous maze of corrupt interests or settle for the kind of easy answers the local press can spin into election-night victory. DeSain does know a thing or two about crime writing, although the prose sometimes lacks literary style. He sets Gus’ odyssey in a convincingly multilayered social milieu populated by a slew of likely suspects, including a dissolute Hollywood producer, a drug cartel kingpin and a shadowy Julian Assange–inspired Internet activist obsessed with ushering in an age of “total information awareness.” Unfortunately, the real villain here is the novel’s penchant for broad social satire, which falls flat under a too-heavy hand and drags the novel down every time it starts picking up speed. The reflexive lampooning of the Internet age robs the novel’s climax of any punch it might have had. At its best, however, the novel succeeds as a charmingly suspenseful study of a corrupt cop who surprises himself by turning out to be pretty good at his job.
A promisingly complex detective story too often sidelined by editorializing.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615824895
Page Count: 174
Publisher: John D.\DeSain
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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