The Rube Goldberg plot is rickety but relentless, and although most of the cast is excruciatingly familiar, it’s hard to...
Despite constant attempts by other gun-toting worthies to upstage it, Vinnie McCloskey-Schmidt’s head is indeed the centerpiece of this grisly criminal farce.
Chronic Long Island loser Johnnie LoDuco, two weeks out of stir, looks like he’s set to go back in when his car’s battery dies and he’s caught boosting a replacement vehicle. Before his court date rolls around, Johnnie runs into Bug Rankin, the public defender who once tried unsuccessfully to get him acquitted on obscenity charges, and two business associates who’ve just robbed a deli. When the cops pounce, they grab Johnnie along with the perps, who naturally finger him as the ringleader. Facing serious time, Johnnie’s delighted but suspicious when he’s bailed out, apparently by his old school buddy Vinnie, whose current partnership with disgraced Dr. Jennifer Smeals involves fleecing customers of a few measly cents on every transaction and setting up a corporation in Paraguay where Johnnie can “administrate” the proceeds. In a rare moment of insight, Johnnie reflects that “we made a great team, except for me.” Vinnie’s plan runs into a snag, literally, when Johnnie, idly fishing off the end of a pier, hooks his buddy’s severed head. And that’s all in the first 60 pages. Johnnie will soon be pursued by mobsters demanding their money (what money?), king-sized trigger-men, cops on the take and the Headhunter, a recovering serial killer who lives with his mom. Rookie novelist Lecard keeps the twists and turns coming, but since every lowlife who swims into view seems equally greedy, deceptive and demented, you may not care when Johnnie caroms from one to the next.
The Rube Goldberg plot is rickety but relentless, and although most of the cast is excruciatingly familiar, it’s hard to resist dim, sweet Johnnie, especially when he seems about to find true love.Pub Date: March 13, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-36021-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
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
As in summer movies, a triple dose of violence conceals the absence of real menace when neither victims nor avengers stir...
Dr. Alex Cross has left Metro DC Homicide for the FBI, but it’s business as usual in this laughably rough-hewn fairy tale of modern-day white slavery.
According to reliable sources, more people are being sold into slavery than ever before, and it all seems to be going down on the FBI’s watch. Atlanta ex-reporter Elizabeth Connolly, who looks just like Claudia Schiffer, is the ninth target over the past two years to be abducted by a husband-and-wife pair who travel the country at the behest of the nefarious Pasha Sorokin, the Wolf of the Red Mafiya. The only clues are those deliberately left behind by the kidnappers, who snatch fashion designer Audrey Meek from the King of Prussia Mall in full view of her children, or patrons like Audrey’s purchaser, who ends up releasing her and killing himself. Who you gonna call? Alex Cross, of course. Even though he still hasn’t finished the Agency’s training course, all the higher-ups he runs into, from hardcases who trust him to lickspittles seething with envy, have obviously read his dossier (Four Blind Mice, 2002, etc.), and they know the new guy is “close to psychic,” a “one-man flying squad” who’s already a legend, “like Clarice Starling in the movies.” It’s lucky that Cross’s reputation precedes him, because his fond creator doesn’t give him much to do here but chase suspects identified by obliging tipsters and worry about his family (Alex Jr.’s mother, alarmed at Cross’s dangerous job, is suing for custody) while the Wolf and his cronies—Sterling, Mr. Potter, the Art Director, Sphinx, and the Marvel—kidnap more dishy women (and the occasional gay man) and kill everybody who gets in their way, and quite a few poor souls who don’t.
As in summer movies, a triple dose of violence conceals the absence of real menace when neither victims nor avengers stir the slightest sympathy.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-60290-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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