A thoroughly enjoyable—if sometimes bumpy—ride with a philosophical outlaw trucker.
A street-smart, spiritually oriented trucker hauls much more than freight in Arnold’s action thriller.
“Relax, Mister Smith,” truck driver Buddy Green says to his new passenger and client. “It’s smooth sailing here on the Shakey Town Express.” In addition to hauling goods up and down California’s I-5 corridor, Buddy runs a successful side business helping all kinds of fugitives (like Mister Smith) slip past the law. There are just a few rules everyone has to abide by: no smoking, no guns in the front seat, no music other than country, and no taking the Lord’s name in vain. (Buddy explains that he has “disabused” himself of a strict moral code after serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, but he remains a devout Christian.) Smith begrudgingly agrees to Buddy’s rules, and the two find themselves locked in endless debates about God, war, and everything in between. (The Great Gatsby even becomes a hot topic when Smith discovers that Buddy enjoys hosting a trucker book club with no-nonsense former MMA fighter Large Marge, one of the book’s best characters.) What Buddy doesn’t know yet is that Smith isn’t just on the run for fraud—he’s a member of a gang that just pulled off a deadly heist. Danger lies in wait for them at Smith’s destination of Los Angeles, where a young sex worker named Dylan, who has crossed the wrong Hollywood mogul, is also waiting and putting all her hopes on Buddy. Arnold introduces readers to this gruff but fascinating world with fantastic cinematic energy, snappy dialogue, and well-calibrated suspense. Buddy is an instantly likable character whom readers will be happy to ride along with. The treatment of Smith (and, as a consequence, the overall story) is more uneven. Pages fly by when Smith and Buddy settle into a Midnight Run-like action-comedy groove, evading the police and learning about each other. But a sudden burst of unexpected, gratuitous violence awkwardly shifts the story’s stakes and tone. (The second half, dedicated to Dylan, has a great set-up and some touching moments but feels like an entirely different novel.) Arnold assembles some inventive set pieces and memorable characters here, but they don’t quite make a cohesive whole.
A thoroughly enjoyable—if sometimes bumpy—ride with a philosophical outlaw trucker.Pub Date: May 27, 2024
ISBN: 9798326853196
Page Count: 466
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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