Crime novels don't get much grittier or more brutal than the second thriller by Solares (The Black Minutes, 2010), set in a contemporary northern Mexico that's a blood-soaked moonscape.
"This isn't a city anymore," a former colleague tells Carlos Treviño when the ex-cop returns to the corrupt, cartel-run coastal city of La Eternidad. "It's a...western." The teenage daughter of a wealthy industrialist has been kidnapped—an everyday occurrence here, given the vicious turf wars and power struggles that have emptied out the city, closed its clubs and restaurants, and left the streets filled with countless roadblock shakedowns and the burned-out husks of cars. But the girl's body hasn't been discovered, and there's been no demand for ransom. Might she still be saved? Though Treviño is a wanted man here, having crossed the police chief and his minions by being incorruptible, the reluctant detective gets coaxed back from his remote hideaway by the possibility of a gigantic paycheck. Meanwhile, Treviño's old police antagonist, the venal opportunist (and thus survivor) Chief Margarito González, is trying to feather his nest before retiring, and he'd love to exact revenge against Treviño on the way out. Solares' great gift here is for setting. He captures heart-wrenchingly the grim chaos and hopelessness of a country run by drug lords, smugglers, and the sleazy kleptocrats they own. Some readers may struggle with the machismo that dominates not only the city, but the novel, and in the second half especially, which focuses on Margarito's grafts within grafts and intrigues within intrigues, the plot and structure grow a bit too baroque and disorderly, but Solares keeps the pace high, the pages turning.
A sort of Mexico Confidential, with noirish atmosphere to burn and a very high body count.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2815-7
Page Count: 488
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | THRILLER | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE
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A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986
ISBN: 0553381547
Page Count: 686
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
84
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Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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