Like Neville’s 1988 debut, The Eight, another daft, overstuffed, sprawling sofa of a yarn involving dozens of famous figures, places, and objects, along with a mysterious manuscript that nobody ever gets to read—oh, yeah, and the collapse of communism. Ariel Behn, a nuclear security worker and part-time code-breaker, is devastated when her beloved brother, Sam (he isn’t really her brother and. . . well, it’s complicated), turns up dead. Among other things, he had a manuscript for Ariel that, suddenly, all sorts of people are eager to lay their hands on. Then a decidedly undead Sam (bad guys tried to assassinate him and got the wrong man) contacts his sister and says he sent her the encoded document, though it’s never arrived. The devilishly handsome Wolfgang Hauser of the International Atomic Energy Agency also shows an interest in the manuscript, as does Uncle Lafcadio, arriving from Austria, violin teacher Dacian Bassarides (Ariel’s grandfather, we eventually learn), and Ariel’s boss, Pastor Owen Dart. Meanwhile, in numerous historical asides, we meet Ariel’s great-aunt Clio (she finds something important in the Sibyl’s cave in 1890), Jesus, Aleister Crowley, Pontius Pilate, four Roman emperors, Joseph of Arimathea, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, and. . . . What are they all after? It seems a set of ancient sacred objects, or “Hallows,” possess immense magical powers, and the manuscript describes—maybe locates—those objects. There’s more than one manuscript, of course. Elsewhere, Ariel learns just how diverse and cosmopolitan her huge family is: Adolf Hitler, or “Lucky,” was a close family friend; various other relatives turn out to be fascists; and wolfish Wolfgang, a Nazi who’s crazy about Ariel while he thinks she’s thoroughly Aryan, is crushed to learn that her grandfather was a gypsy. The heroine’s devastating discoveries concerning her family’s murky history are intriguing and worthwhile; pity Neville didn’t just junk the rest of it. Still, fans of The Eight should stagger away with bemused grins. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-40792-X
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A solid sense of place, a looming sense of menace: a frequently gripping read.
Veste’s moody procedural tells the story of a pair of Liverpool detectives tracking a killer influenced by local mythology.
Louise Henderson, the investigator at the heart of this novel, is a detective with secrets. She keeps some from her partner, DS Shipley; when the book opens, she’s also grappling with moments of sudden and inexplicable terror that leave her unsure of their origin and unsettled by their impact on her. Soon, the detectives take up the case of a woman who escaped a deadly attack—and who believes it was the work of the title character, a local legend who may be a murderer, a supernatural creature, or something else entirely. Not long after that, a dead body shows up, which suggests a connection to an earlier death, but a host of loose ends hang for the detectives to piece together—and there’s also the matter of a series of flashbacks set years earlier, when a teenager vanished. How these seemingly disparate elements connect—sometimes linearly, sometimes via well-made twists—leads the novel to its conclusion. Veste’s slow-burning approach works well, sustaining the sense of general wrongness that gives the narrative so much atmosphere. There are a few heavy-handed moments here and there. “They thought they knew evil. They had no idea” is perhaps the most flagrant example; as this book is either about a serial killer or an urban legend come to life, that sense of menace is already built in to the narrative well enough. But the conclusion is largely satisfying, playing well off the dynamics Veste established over the course of the story.
A solid sense of place, a looming sense of menace: a frequently gripping read.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4926-7129-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fast-paced and fluent, with all the authors’ trademark stratagems. Sure to be a hit, though best read by those with strong...
More Scandinavian psychopathy from the pseudonymous husband-wife team.
Sometimes a boy needs his dad. It being a Shakespearean world, sometimes a boy just needs to kill his dad, even if the paternity is not firmly established—in which instance you can bet on plenty of collateral damage. In Kepler’s newest, the bodies stack up quickly. The first to fall is Sweden’s foreign minister, who is decidedly not a nice guy and has his eyes shot out for his transgressions. That’s not the least icky of the ugly fates visited on the so-called Rabbit Hunter’s victims, as when the killer gazes meaningfully at one of them and “decides that he’s going to cut his legs off and watch him crawl like a snail through his own blood.” Against this gruesome backdrop, only Joona Linna, the ethnically Finnish Swedish supercop, stands a chance of sussing out what’s going on. Trouble is, he’s in the slammer, having been locked away in a maximum security prison for the last two years for his part in events that unfolded in Stalker (2019). It’s only when the prime minister, suspecting that his foreign minister’s death has come at the hands of terrorists, intercedes to make Joona “a highly unorthodox offer” that he can swing back into action with Stockholm cop Saga Bauer and figure out why it is that the trail of blood leads to a TV studio by way of a Chicago psychiatric hospital. As always, along with the many bodies left behind by the “spree killer,” there’s a shoal of red herrings in Kepler’s narrative—human smugglers here, Afghan refugees and the FBI there—and all sorts of ancillary unpleasantries, from rape to evisceration and the chilling thought that when the Rabbit Killer’s victims finally die, various bits of their bodies removed, “the world becomes completely still, like a winter landscape."
Fast-paced and fluent, with all the authors’ trademark stratagems. Sure to be a hit, though best read by those with strong stomachs.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3228-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
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