While most of Sanders' thrillers (the Deadly Sin series, The Passion of Molly T., etc.) tend to be lurid psychodramas, his Commandment novels (this is the third) offer a milder, more old-fashioned brand of murder-mystery—padded out to Big-Book length with New Yorky atmosphere and faintly offbeat character-comedy. And this time the somewhat cutesy narrator-sleuth is young Mary Lou Bateson, a.k.a. Dunk, a 6'2 numismatist from Des Moines—whose early career in New York is reviewed in the enticing opening chapters here. When the plot proper begins, however, things become much more routine. Mary Lou, now in charge of coins at the Grandby & Sons auction-house, has had her first big triumph: wealthy Archibald Havistock has chosen Grandby to auction off his huge, priceless coin collection-including a Greek treasure (to the tune of $350,000) called the Demaretion! But disaster soon follows—when the case containing the Demaretion is replaced with an empty duplicate during the transfer of the collection from the Havistock townhouse to Grandby & Sons. Who stole the coin? That's the question for amateur sleuth Mary Lou (out to clear her own name), who soon determines that the theft must have been an inside job. So the chief suspects are all Havistock family members: Archibald's flaky older daughter, who (with her creepy husband) dabbles in spouse-swapping and home porno; younger daughter Natalie, a zonked-out rebel/kleptomaniac with a bisexual, dangerous black boyfriend; son Luther, a loser with a promiscuous sexpot-wife named Vanessa; and nephew Orson, Havistock, Sr.'s slimy secretary (also bisexual). And things get more complicated—if not much more interesting—when the Havistocks are soon also revealed to be involved in murder (three corpses), blackmail, and heavy-duty psychopathology. None of the solutions—to the murders or the theft—is especially surprising or satisfying. Mary Lou's sleuthing is a predictable round-robin of chats with the kinky Havistocks. But her blooming love-life—simultaneous affairs with the two official investigators on the case (a sloppy cop, a rakish insurance-shamus)—provides a modicum of racy romantic charm. And, despite the terribly dated sound of Sanders' slangy/vulgar dialogue, there's enough glossy pep here to make this passably engaging entertainment: one of the old pro's distinctly lesser entries.
Pub Date: June 5, 1986
ISBN: 0399131256
Page Count: -
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1986
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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