This is a whip-smart mystery and a moving meditation on the consumption of female bodies all rolled into one.
When a provocative painter goes missing on the opening night of her show, a museum copywriter falls back on her investigative roots.
Kim Lord enjoys shocking her audiences, and Still Lives, her latest exhibition for LA’s high-flying Rocque Museum, is no exception. Drawing on media coverage of murdered women, Lord produces a grisly set of paintings depicting the slain forms of Judy Ann Dull, Nicole Brown Simpson, and the Black Dahlia. The exhibition is “an indictment of our culture’s obsession with sensationalized female murders,” and Maggie Richter, the museum’s in-house writer/editor, can barely stomach it—for more reasons than one. A few months earlier, her live-in boyfriend, the gallerist Greg Shaw Ferguson, left Maggie for Lord, a humiliation she’s still struggling to live down. When Lord fails to show for her big opening night, everyone suspects foul play—and Greg. But will Maggie be able to uncover what really happened in time? And who is she really trying to save by digging into Lord’s disappearance? In this taut take on noir, misogyny, and the art of responsible storytelling, Hummel (Motherland, 2014, etc.) balances the glitz and glam of the Los Angeles art world with the town tourists don’t often see, from peeling, postwar bungalows to skid row tent cities and suffering junkies. There’s a full cast of supporting characters, including Kevin, an earnest East Coast reporter covering the gala; Hendricks, a private investigator who seems to know too much about Maggie; Yegina, Maggie’s talented and ambitious best friend; and a rotating gallery of suspicious art world collectors, carpenters, curators, and crew. At times the interpersonal dramas are larger-than-life, but this literary mystery has larger-than-life ambitions, too. “I hate this artwork,” Maggie thinks, standing in the gallery, fretting about Lord’s disappearance. “I hate the abject powerlessness it projects. I hate it because it reminds me there is an end for women worse than death.” But Lord, through the careful plotting of Hummel, is determined to make you look.
This is a whip-smart mystery and a moving meditation on the consumption of female bodies all rolled into one.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61902-111-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Neither story is anywhere near Westlake’s best work, but they still make a terrific tragicomic pair.
Hard Case revives a pair of movie-related novellas originally published under the cryptic title Enough in 1977.
A Travesty, the first and longer of these stories, opens with movie reviewer Carey Thorpe standing over the dead body of actress Laura Penney, the lover with whom his quarrel had suddenly and fatally escalated. Even though her death was technically an accident, Carey, who doesn’t want anyone connecting him with it, immediately begins concealing all indications that he was ever in her apartment. It’s all for naught: Soon he finds himself blackmailed by private detective John Edgarson and having to commit another felony to satisfy his demands. From that point on, his dilemma rapidly spirals into one of the comic nightmares in which Westlake (Brothers Keepers, 1975/2019, etc.) specialized: Moments in which he’s threatened with exposure alternate with long intervals in which NYPD DS Al Bray and especially DS Fred Staples, who’ve decided that he’s innocent, take Carey under their wings, marveling at his ability to solve murders committed by other people; then he caps his transgressions by taking Staples’ wife, Patricia, to bed. The second novella, Ordo, couldn’t be more different. The naval mates of Ordo Tupikos, a deeply ordinary San Diego sailor, tell him that Estelle Anlic, the woman whose marriage to him was annulled years ago when the courts, egged on by her mother, discovered that she was underage, has transformed herself into movie star Dawn Devayne. Against all odds, he manages to reintroduce himself to Estelle, or Dawn, but although her agent plays it as a storybook reunion, Orry just can’t find Estelle in Dawn, who’s changed a lot more than he has, and the tale ends on a note of sad resignation.
Neither story is anywhere near Westlake’s best work, but they still make a terrific tragicomic pair.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78565-720-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hard Case Crime
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Surviving a crime is the beginning of the story, not the end, in this astute, engrossing thriller.
This complex psychological thriller digs deep into the layers of trauma that linger long after a terrible crime.
This is the 17th novel by Unger (Under My Skin, 2018, etc.), and it revisits one of her frequent themes: the indelible impact of violence on the survivors of crimes. The survivor at its center is Rain Winter, who at age 12 was one of three friends who became the victims of a monster. At first glance, Rain seems to have overcome that nightmare. She’s happily married and reveling in motherhood, although she vacillates between the joy she finds in 1-year-old Lily and the tug of the job she left as a hard-charging radio news producer. That tug increases when she hears that a man whose murder trial she covered, a man who was acquitted of killing his pregnant wife, has been found dead—killed in just the same way his wife was. Rain was sure he was guilty, so she feels some dark satisfaction, and her investigative instincts (and maybe something else) are aroused when a dark web mole, tipster, and blogger tells her off the record that there have been other, very similar revenge murders, and they might be the work of the same person. That wakes her own worst memories: “There weren’t many people who remembered Rain’s ugly history. It was big news once, but it had faded in the bubbling morass of horrific crimes since then.” Its aftermath included the children’s attacker being released from prison—and murdered. Chapters describing Rain’s pursuit of the story of a possible vengeful serial killer are intercut with chapters narrated by a mysterious person from her past, one who is closer to her in the present than she knows. Unger skillfully peels back the layers of Rain’s emotional scar tissue to expose the truth of what happened in her childhood and the fear, rage, and guilt it left behind, with a series of shocking consequences.
Surviving a crime is the beginning of the story, not the end, in this astute, engrossing thriller.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7783-0872-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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