Despite a slow buildup, a satisfying read.
A densely populated and spirited novel based on an actual heist. And helicopters.
The polyglot nature of present-day Sweden is ably represented in this imaginative re-creation of the 2009 robbery of a currency counting house. The caper is the handiwork of Zoran Petrovic, a Montenegrin living in Sweden; Michel Maloof, of Lebanese descent; Sami Farhan, who grew up in Sweden with Middle Eastern parents; and to a lesser extent Niklas Nordgren, whose parents emigrated from Poland, all of whom are to some extent inhabitants of Sweden's criminal underworld. They are pointed by a shadowy "old man" toward Alexandra Svensson, an employee of G4S, a currency and security management company that is the daily repository of literally hundreds of millions of kronor. While Maloof romances Svensson and receives vital inside information, he, Farhan, and Petrovic slowly evolve a plan to land a team of thieves on the roof of the G4S building and rob the counting room. Along the way they enlist the services of a large number of people, including Nordgren, their explosives expert, and the American helicopter pilot Jack Kluger. There are setbacks and small triumphs, and when the whole plot comes to the attention of Caroline Thurn, a task force leader in Sweden's Police Authority, the race is on: Can Thurn unravel the clues and intercept the thieves before the heist takes place? There are a lot of moving parts in the scheme, and when it creaks into action on a September night there's no certainty the machine will function as designed, and the minute-by-minute unfolding of the plot elements is deftly and suspensefully presented. It takes a while to get to know the characters, and the many minor actors can be hard to manage, but everyone, good guys or not so good, achieves a decent humanity and earns a measure of affection by the end. How closely the novel resembles historical reality is happily never revealed.
Despite a slow buildup, a satisfying read.Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59051-950-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
Readers may wish to tackle this heart-pounding novel in highly populated, well-lit areas—snacks optional.
Some thrillers produce shivers, others trigger goose bumps; Cutter’s graphic offering will have readers jumping out of their skins.
Scoutmaster Dr. Tim Riggs takes his troop for their annual camping trip to Falstaff Island, an uninhabited area not far from their home on Prince Edward Island. The five 14-year-old boys who comprise Troop 52 are a diverse group: popular school jock, Kent, whose father is the chief of police; best friends Ephraim and Max, one the son of a petty thief who’s serving time in prison and the other the son of the coroner who also serves as the local taxidermist; Shelley, an odd loner with a creepy proclivity for animal torture and touching girls’ hair; and Newton, the overweight nerdy kid who’s the butt of the other boys’ jokes. When a skeletal, voracious, obviously ill man shows up on the island the first night of their trip, Tim’s efforts to assist him unleash a series of events which the author describes in gruesome, deliciously gory detail. Tom Padgett is the subject of a scientific test gone horribly wrong, or so it seems, and soon, the Scouts face a nightmare that worms its way into the group and wreaks every kind of havoc imaginable. With no way to leave the island (the boat Tom arrived on is disabled, and the troop was dropped off by a different boat), the boys fight to survive. Cutter’s narrative of unfolding events on the island is supplemented with well-placed interviews, pages from diaries, and magazine and newspaper articles, which provide answers to the reader in bits and pieces—but perhaps more importantly, it also delivers much-needed respites from the intense narrative as the boys battle for their lives on the island. Cutter (who created this work under a pseudonym) packs a powerful punch by plunging readers into gut-wrenching, explicit imagery that’s not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach.
Readers may wish to tackle this heart-pounding novel in highly populated, well-lit areas—snacks optional.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1771-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by...
Almost as frustrating as it is commanding, McCarthy’s ninth (and first since the completion of his Border Trilogy: Cities of the Plain, 1998, etc.) is a formidable display of stunningly written scenes that don’t quite cohere into a fully satisfying narrative.
It’s a bleak chronicle of murder, revenge and implacable fate pocked with numerous echoes of McCarthy’s great Blood Meridian (1985). Here, the story’s set in 1980 in southern Texas near the Mexican border, where aging Sheriff Bell, a decorated WWII veteran, broods heroically over the territory he’s sworn to protect, while—in a superb, sorrowful monologue—acknowledging the omnipresence of ineradicable evil all around him. Then the focus trains itself on Vietnam vet Llewellyn Moss, a hunter who stumbles upon several dead bodies, a stash of Mexican heroin and more than $2 million in cash that he absconds with. The tale then leaps among the hunted (Moss), an escaped killer (Anton Chigurh), whose crimes include double-crossing the drug cartel from which the money was taken, the Army Special Forces freelancer (Carson Wells) hired by druglords and—in dogged pursuit of all the horrors spawned by their several interactions—the intrepid, however flawed and guilty, stoical Sheriff Bell: perhaps the most fully human and sympathetic character McCarthy has ever created. The justly praised near-biblical style, an artful fusion of brisk declarative sentences and vivid, simple images, confers horrific intensity on the escalating violence and chaos, while precisely dramatizing the sense of nemesis that pursues and punishes McCarthy’s characters (scorpions in a sealed bottle). But this eloquent melodrama is seriously weakened by its insufficiently varied reiterated message: “if you were Satan . . . tryin to bring the human race to its knees, what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by William Faulkner.Pub Date: July 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40677-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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