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
Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It”...
Queen of the summer novel—how could she not be, with all her stories set on an island—Hilderbrand delivers a beguiling ninth (The Castaways, 2009, etc.), featuring romance and mystery on isolated Tuckernuck Island.
The Tate family has had a house on Tuckernuck (just off the coast of swanky Nantucket) for generations. It has been empty for years, but now Birdie wants to spend a quiet mother-daughter week there with Chess before Chess’s wedding to Michael Morgan. Then the unthinkable happens—perfect Chess (beautiful, rich, well-bred food editor of Glamorous Home) dumps the equally perfect Michael. She quits her job, leaves her New York apartment for Birdie’s home in New Canaan, and all without explanation. Then the unraveling continues: Michael dies in a rock-climbing accident, leaving Chess not quite a widow, but devastated, guilty, unreachable in the shell of herself. Birdie invites her younger daughter Tate (a pretty, naïve computer genius) and her own bohemian sister India, whose husband, world-renowned sculptor Bill Bishop, killed himself years ago, to Tuckernuck for the month of July, in the hopes that the three of them can break through to Chess. Hunky Barrett Lee is their caretaker, coming from Nantucket twice a day to bring groceries and take away laundry (idyllic Tuckernuck is remote—no phone, no hot water, no ferry) as he’s also inspiring renewed lust in Tate, who has had a crush on him since she was a kid. The author jumps between the four women—Tate and her blossoming relationship with Barrett, India and her relationship with Lula Simpson, a painter at the Academy where India is a curator, Birdie, who is surprised by the recent kindnesses of ex-husband Grant, and finally Chess, who in her journal is uncoiling the sordid, sad circumstances of her break with normal life and Michael’s death.
Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It” beach book of the summer.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-04387-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
The first novel in five years from the ever-popular Kingsolver (Pigs in Heaven, 1993, etc.) is a large-scale saga of an American family’s enlightening and disillusioning African adventure. It begins with a stunningly written backward look: Orleanna Price’s embittered memory of the uncompromising zeal that impelled her husband, Baptist missionary Nathan Price, to take her and their four daughters to the (then) Belgian Congo in 1959, and remain there despite dangerous evidence of the country’s instability under Patrice Lumumba’s ill-starred independence movement, Belgian and American interference and condescension, and Joseph Mobutu’s murderous military dictatorship. The bulk of the story, which is set in the superbly realized native village of Kilanga, is narrated in turn by the four Price girls: Leah, the “smart” twin, whose worshipful respect for her father will undergo a rigorous trial by fire; her —retarded” counterpart Adah, disabled and mute (though in the depths of her mind articulate and playfully intelligent); eldest sister Rachel, a self-important whiner given to hilarious malapropisms (“feminine tuition”; “I prefer to remain anomalous”); and youngest sister Ruth May, whose childish fantasies of union with the surrounding, smothering landscape are cruelly fulfilled. Kingsolver skillfully orchestrates her characters— varied responses to Africa into a consistently absorbing narrative that reaches climax after climax—and that, even after you’re sure it must be nearing its end, continues for a wrenching hundred pages or more, spelling out in unforgettable dramatic and lyric terms the fates of the surviving Prices. Little recent fiction has so successfully fused the personal with the political. Better even than Robert Stone in his otherwise brilliant Damascus Gate, Kingsolver convinces us that her characters are, first and foremost, breathing, fallible human beings and only secondarily conduits for her book’s vigorously expressed and argued social and political ideas. A triumph.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-017540-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
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