Off-the-wall strange and surreal—and definitely not recommended as a Mother’s Day gift.
A narrative that moves from a noirish hard-boiled detective novel to a fantasy of sexual transformation, an uncomfortable journey for the first-person narrator and for the reader.
Birch Ritter is a detective—cynical and world-weary, of course—whose patter sounds at once fresh and drearily familiar: “It was a hooker, I was pretty sure. It was trouble I was certain”; “She had a laugh like Stevie Nicks on nitrous oxide and a slow burn gotta-get-there bed moan like an ambulance in Friday night rush hour.” Ritter gets involved in two puzzling cases: Real-estate mogul Deems Whitney is found dead in his burnt-out Mercedes, and a man named Mervyn Stoakes has engaged in a spasm of self-castration. One of Ritter’s old partners then mysteriously puts him onto Genevieve, Whitney’s widow, whose grief for her husband’s death might be for show. When Ritter goes to meet her in her old house in a rundown section of town, his life literally changes. She takes off her clothes, blindfolds him and tells him his name is going to be “Sunny.” Ritter is intrigued, bewildered and ultimately frightened by the charismatic and powerful Genevieve, and he keeps going back for more—not for sex but for the powerful draw of her personality and for what she can reveal to him about his past. Ultimately, Ritter/Sunny notices some changes, not just in his personality (crying, for example, starts to become a more normative experience for him) but also in his body. Genevieve is a shape-changer who’s able to reinvent some of the ghostly images from Ritter’s past, including his mother. By the end the word “freakish” doesn’t even begin to describe the events of the novel, which include Ritter’s pet cat being devoured by a giant snake and Genevieve serving up her consort Sophia as “tender meat” in an entrée Ritter unwittingly consumes.
Off-the-wall strange and surreal—and definitely not recommended as a Mother’s Day gift.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59020-176-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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