Overly intricate character work hobbles a crafty plot.
Fraser’s (Frozen Statues, 2017, etc.) thriller follows a pair of private investigators as their respective workloads converge on a killer.
In Toronto, private investigators Samantha McNamara and Reece Hash are engaged. Sam is pursuing her doctoral degree and hopes to get an internship at the Serenity Clinic under neuropsychiatrist Dr. Emily Armstrong. Reece is a legal articling student assigned to “audit police due diligence” in several “closed sudden-death cases.” Busying their lives further is a new puppy, Pepin, and the siblings Eli and Danny Watson, who form the technologically savvy portion of the investigative team. At the clinic, Sam is offered the internship, but only if she’s willing to help deprogram 17-year-old Fadiya Basha, survivor of the Bueton Sanctuary cult. Fadiya believes that the cult’s deceased leader, Mussani, visits her at night. She’s also eight weeks pregnant, which shouldn’t be possible. Meanwhile, Reece learns that drone sightings connect his cases. As the two PIs proceed, each must decide whether to navigate treacherous moral terrain for the greater good. Fraser’s latest Perdition Games thriller augments plotlines with domestic travails, including the noisy, destructive Pepin and Sam’s Alzheimer’s-stricken mother, Grace, who insists on planning an elaborate wedding for her daughter. While these elements help the main characters grow within the series, they also slow momentum. Chapters follow Sam, Reece, and someone named Blu, whose tragic upbringing in Louisiana borders on the Dickensian. Fraser toys with readers, creating victims who are so repulsive that we practically cheer their demises. A tangle of subplots—featuring the gruff Dr. Mathias Beauregard and the young science prodigy Azar Basha—helps obscure the connecting element between Sam’s and Reece’s cases. Fraser drains some of the menace from her killer by providing an overly elaborate backstory. However, excellent use of Eli, who has Asperger syndrome, bolsters the final third. Readers will be entertained if they can reconcile the driving events in the present with the melodrama of the flashbacks.
Overly intricate character work hobbles a crafty plot.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9947742-6-2
Page Count: 399
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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