A sad, swift tale bearing rueful observations about color and class as urgent now as 24 years ago.
A savage hate crime impels a young man toward a deeper reckoning with his biracial identity.
Vercher’s debut novel is a blunt-edged thriller in which several disquieting revelations are set in motion on a snowy night in Pittsburgh circa 1995 when Bobby Saraceno, a 22-year-old restaurant worker, is pleasantly surprised to reunite with Aaron, his best friend from school days, who has just been paroled after a three-year prison stretch. Bobby notices his one-time fellow comic-book nerd has come out of stir bearing a “Hulked-out” physique along with a deep facial scar. Soon Bobby notices something else Aaron’s carrying: tattoos with lightning bolts and an Iron Eagle. They encounter a young black man at a fast-food diner who recognizes those tattoos as white supremacist insignia. He harangues them both toward the parking lot, where Aaron sets upon the black youth and repeatedly pounds his head with a brick. “Some animals need to be put down,” Aaron says to a stunned Bobby as they drive away from his victim before police arrive. Bobby decides out of loyalty that he’s going to protect himself and his friend from arrest even though Bobby’s carrying a secret that neither Aaron nor anyone else in his life knows: That he is the son of a black man he’s never met who had an affair with his white mother, a hot mess named Isabel who has trouble staying on the wagon. Not only has Bobby been “passing” for white, but even after finding out about his racial origins at age 11, he’s also been carrying some of the same bigoted opinions toward minorities as his maternal grandfather. Matters are complicated when Isabel decides in the midst of this turmoil to introduce Bobby to his father, who it turns out isn’t dead (as Bobby had believed) but alive and well and working as an emergency room doctor at a local hospital.
A sad, swift tale bearing rueful observations about color and class as urgent now as 24 years ago.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947993-67-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Polis Books
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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