Rated NC-17 for intermittent comic violence, good-natured swearing, cannibalism, humorous amorality and some truly perverse...
Carl Hiaasen, meet Hannibal Lecter.
Caterers to a movie shoot are covered by the Teamsters Union’s lucrative contract conditions, and Las Vegas production caterer Big Jack Lucey doesn’t see why island caterer Sid Tanumafili and his family should have a monopoly on everything shot in Hawaii. But Sid, his son Wilson and his nephew Joseph like the current arrangement just fine. So when a unit producer brings Jack with him to cater the pilot for a hoped-for TV series, Sid declares war on the invaders. The mainlanders are hobbled by a couple of handicaps that won’t surprise fans of Moist (2002): Francis, the producer, is mourning his breakup with Chad, a big-shot producer with the morals of a gay lifeguard, and Big Jack has recently suffered a stroke that’s left him partly paralyzed and with a bad case of technologically induced priapism. While Jack is getting the local Teamster leaders to sign on the dotted line, Yuki Sugimoto, Francis’s New Age production assistant, is reinventing herself as an androgynous sexpot on the advice of Lono, the local pimp she falls for. Unable to concentrate for long on anything but his sempiternal erection, Jack hires an ex-Marine hit man to settle his labor problems, but unexpected complications with the payoff force him to an even more sanguinary Plan B. As the entire cast caroms from one lighthearted set piece to the next with all the speed and depth of pinballs, an unidentified pair of them is unwittingly headed for a future in the Tanumafili barbecue pit, and the rest headed nowhere in particular. The effect is fast, funny and sometimes winsome, but consistently lightweight, the characters’ bizarre actions fueled by nothing more than their unquenchable appetite for sex, liquor, drugs or the next plot twist.
Rated NC-17 for intermittent comic violence, good-natured swearing, cannibalism, humorous amorality and some truly perverse sex.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-87113-884-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
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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