Nineteen classic tales of gloom from the Sunshine State.
Although the stories, all of them reprints, are grouped thematically into four sections, they’re arranged chronologically, and their development over the 90-plus years they span is startling. In Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ 1925 “Pineland,” Miami is largely rural, even wilder in its landscape than the orderly groves of Orange County, which its pioneer heroine abandons for the pine forests further south. Nature is also the greatest threat in the excerpt from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God. But in Damon Runyon’s “A Job for the Macarone,” written the same year, people are the authors of their own doom. They lie, cheat, and double-cross each other, and they go right on doing so in Brett Halliday’s 1944 novella, A Taste for Cognac. By the ’70s and ’80s, the focus begins to shift to political and social ills. The Cuban migration serves as backdrop for an excerpt from Douglas Fairbairn’s “Street 8,” and Charles Willeford explores predatory sexual behavior among single men in “Saturday Night Special.” The economic angst of the 1990s is highlighted in Elmore Leonard’s “The Odyssey,” T.J. MacGregor’s “The Works,” Lynne Barrett’s “To Go,” and editor Standiford’s “Tahiti Junk Shop.” And as the 21st century dawns, stories like Vicki Hendricks’ “Gators” and Preston L. Allen’s “Superheroes” are markedly more sexualized, and the hardscrabble Little Havana setting of “Street 8” is reinvented as fabulous South Beach in Carolina Garcia-Aguilera’s “Washington Avenue.”
A collection that shows how far a city can come and still maintain a strong noir tradition.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61775-806-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SHORT STORIES | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Did you like this book?
Twenty years after Chloe Davis’ father was convicted of killing half a dozen young women, someone seems to be celebrating the anniversary by extending the list.
No one in little Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, was left untouched by Richard Davis’ confession, least of all his family members. His wife, Mona, tried to kill herself and has been incapacitated ever since. His son, Cooper, became so suspicious that even now it’s hard for him to accept pharmaceutical salesman Daniel Briggs, whose sister, Sophie, also vanished 20 years ago, as Chloe’s fiance. And Chloe’s own nightmares, which lead her to rebuff New York Times reporter Aaron Jansen, who wants to interview her for an anniversary story, are redoubled when her newest psychiatric patient, Lacey Deckler, follows the path of high school student Aubrey Gravino by disappearing and then turning up dead. The good news is that Dick Davis, whom Chloe has had no contact with ever since he was imprisoned after his confession, obviously didn’t commit these new crimes. The bad news is that someone else did, someone who knows a great deal about the earlier cases, someone who could be very close to Chloe indeed. First-timer Willingham laces her first-person narrative with a stifling sense of victimhood that extends even to the survivors and a series of climactic revelations, at least some of which are guaranteed to surprise the most hard-bitten readers.
The story is sadly familiar, the treatment claustrophobically intense.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-2508-0382-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
