by Jonathan Papernick ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 12, 2015
Papernick (The Ascent of Eli Israel, 2002, etc.) plows fresh ground in this terrorist thriller, but for all the book's...
Following the death of his father, a disgraced judge, psychologically disheveled Matthew Stone is drawn into a pre-9/11 terrorist plot by Jewish extremists in Brooklyn.
Stone, an only child whose grandfather was a notorious gangster, clings to the belief that his father was clean—that he didn't, among other alleged misdeeds, rig a jury to let off the Jewish killer of a Palestinian shopkeeper. The substance-abusing, self-mutilating Matthew's greatest source of comfort is wearing the judge's robes and reading his vast collection of books, viewing the underlined passages as clues to his distant old man's true identity. But Stone's misery and confusion intensify with the sudden appearance of his Israeli "Uncle Zal," an old friend of his father's, who, beneath his expressions of caring and religiosity, is mainly interested in gaining access to the vast amount of money the judge left behind; Matthew's mother, an acclaimed painter who left the family when he was 12, who now warns him to stay away from Zal; and an FBI agent who wants Stone to be his confidential informant on the terrorist plot. At its best, the book is a gripping and timely look into a subculture that's bonded by loyalty but driven by hate to avenge anti-Jewish crimes. Papernick, a Boston-based Toronto native who's spent time in Israel, does a good job of sketching the historical context of his characters' actions. But Stone is so self-loathing that he never earns our sympathy, and he's such a bundle of unresolved conflict and doubt that even the author seems unsure of who he is in the end. His ill-fated romances, with a Palestinian girl in Jerusalem and a Jewish girl with hidden motives in Brooklyn, are the least successful parts of the novel.
Papernick (The Ascent of Eli Israel, 2002, etc.) plows fresh ground in this terrorist thriller, but for all the book's strong background elements, the young protagonist is such a mess that he loses the reader's interest.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-94149-304-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Fig Tree Books
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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