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
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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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