As moody and meandering as a Hemingway epic (Dulaney gets part of his alias from bell-toller Robert Jordan), Dunning’s...
Grandly romantic, nostalgic WWII epic of radio days, summer nights, and Nazis lurking about New Jersey, from the highly regarded book collector and mystery-writer (The Bookman’s Wake, 1995, etc.).
Stepping outside the conventions of his own genre, Dunning aspires to literary greatness and beat-the-bad-guys suspense with this doorstopper-length chronicle of a drifter searching for redemption in a fictional Jersey shore town during the summer of 1942. Jack Dulaney, a novelist whose life is on the skids (despite his big-name agent), escapes from a California chain-gang with the help of Pat Kendall, an acquaintance who makes spare change doing voices as a radio actor. The two agree to meet in the Pennsylvania coal town of Dulaney’s lost only love, Holly Carnahan. Dulaney bums his way cross-country to find the Carnahan home an empty wreck with Kendall’s corpse tossed inside. Some clues lead him to Jersey’s whistle-stop Regina Beach, where Dulaney, now under an alias, finds Holly under an alias singing in a jazz band that occasionally broadcasts from station WHAR. Dulaney joins the studio crew as a writer, discovering a new joy in the loose, anything-goes magic of radio while staying one step ahead of German thugs. Holly, uncertain whether to let their romance reignite, is searching for her father, who had an affair with one of the station’s habitués before disappearing inexplicably. Dulaney soon learns of a homicidal Nazi sympathizer hiding behind the good-natured wartime solidarity of his radio troupe. Attempting to expose him, Delaney writes a series of radio plays about prison camp victims—a series that will draw him ever closer to the truth.
As moody and meandering as a Hemingway epic (Dulaney gets part of his alias from bell-toller Robert Jordan), Dunning’s magnum opus celebrates the forgotten genius of radio, and the winsome heroics of ordinary people caught up in the passion of the great war.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0195-7
Page Count: 479
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory,...
The creator of Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett (Breaking Point, 2013, etc.) works the area around Yellowstone National Park in this stand-alone about a long-haul trucker with sex and murder on his mind.
The Lizard King, as he calls himself, normally targets lot lizards—prostitutes who work the parking lots adjacent to the rest stops that dot interstate highways. But he’s more than happy to move up to a higher class of victim when he runs across the Sullivan sisters. Danielle, 18, and Gracie, 16, are supposed to be driving from their mother’s home in Denver to their father’s in Omaha, but Danielle has had the bright idea of heading instead to Bozeman, Mont., to visit her boyfriend, Justin Hoyt. Far from home, their whereabouts known to only a few people, the girls are the perfect victims even before they nearly collide with the Lizard King’s rig and Danielle flips him off. Hours later, very shortly after he’s caught up with them in the depths of Yellowstone and done his best to eradicate every trace of his abduction, Justin, worried that Danielle refused his last phone call, tells his father that something bad has happened. Cody Hoyt, an investigator for the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Department, is already having a tough day: At the insistence of his crooked boss, Sheriff Tubman, his longtime student and new partner, Cassandra Dewell, has just caught him planting evidence in an unrelated murder, and he’s been suspended from his job. If he’s lost his badge, though, Cody’s got plenty of time on his hands to drive downstate and meet with State Trooper Rick Legerski, the ex-husband of his dispatcher’s sister, to talk about what to do next. And so the countdown begins.
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory, anticlimactic and unsatisfactory ending.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-58320-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tepid follow-up to The Camel Club (2005), with few surprises.
Helped by a beautiful grifter, the “Camel Club”—the four-man band of conspiracy theorists—returns to battle a threat to national security.
Annabelle Conroy is con-artist extraordinaire; Jerry Bagger, mobster and mark; and Roger Seagraves, master assassin. All come straight from central casting. Seagraves is killing high-level government officials, and Conroy is putting together the con of the century, with Bagger as the target. The mysterious death of a rare-books expert at the Library of Congress launches the story, which splits off at first into two different plotlines. In one, Conroy and her team work their way up to their major score. In the other, the Camel Club investigates the mysterious death of a close friend. Things are slightly more exciting in Conroy’s world. She’s assembling her team, eager to settle an old score by taking down Atlantic City’s most notorious and ruthless casino owner. After a series of capers out west to build their bankroll, the team heads back east. There’s little drama Players act out their part; marks fall. The big score comes off without a hitch. The two plots intersect halfway through. Annabelle arrives in D.C., thanks to an awkward development, along with a new piece of unfinished business. Seagraves and the Camel Club are engaged in a cat-and-mouse game, and Annabelle Conroy is the special guest star. The merged stories reach a predictable conclusion. An obvious conflict remains unresolved for much of the way, setting up the next chapter in the saga.
A tepid follow-up to The Camel Club (2005), with few surprises.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-446-53109-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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