Private investigator Luke Jacobs exposes a chilling corporate conspiracy while seeking to free a jailed lawyer friend in this latest installment of a New Orleans mystery series by Mask (The French Quarter, 2013, etc.).
Luke is excited. A key witness has come out of the woodwork, which may help his quest to free Jake Matos, a lawyer pal convicted of killing a cop after being pulled over by police over four years ago. The PI then gets a mystery summons to a meeting about Jake, only to encounter a threatening henchman. Visiting Jake in jail, Luke senses the lawyer is hiding something, perhaps scared into silence. Luke breaks into Jake’s house and finds some odd microscope slides. He asks Melvin Jenkins, a retired forensic pathologist, to examine the materials. While awaiting these findings, Luke pieces together that Jake was pursuing cases that may have posed major problems for mogul Fred Von Tepp and his Mega Alcohol Network. With further assists from his hot doctor girlfriend, a sexy Latina forensics student, a Times-Picayune journalist, a NASA scientist, and others, Luke finally exposes the stunning secret that led to a big business cover-up, police corruption, and Jake’s wrongful conviction. The Louisiana-based Mask clearly revels in his New Orleans setting. He includes loving descriptions of bayous, gardens and bars, and he presents a hip, bantering cast of racially diverse characters that reflects his city’s party spirit and melting-pot status. Mask’s core mystery also had potential as an inventive, alcoholic counterpart to tobacco company–like malfeasance. Unfortunately, the author is a bit of a victim of his own exuberance. He tosses up too many Mardi Gras beads and too many characters and subplots that are digressive or underdeveloped or both, which takes a toll on the logic and clarity of key aspects of the story. He also provides too little explanatory detail for people who haven’t read the earlier Luke Jacobs books. And while Mask’s syncopated rhythm has its pleasures, many readers may feel exhausted rather than energized by this rollicking yet tangled tale. Jazz-beat crime fiction that riffs on Big Easy flavor at the expense of a fully coherent plot.
Pub Date: June 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1456621698
Page Count: 108
Publisher: eBookIt.com
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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