Alive with a devilish plot, the book takes a satisfying, twisted journey into evil.
From debut author Masters comes a novel about the sinister side of a small town and the local sheriff’s attempts to uncover the truth.
Chris Samuels takes the job of sheriff in the town of Plummet, New York, in order to escape the many dangers he faced as a police officer in the Bronx. While quaint, the town is hardly isolated: “The best part of Plummet was that you didn’t feel you were stuck in the boondocks…Route 9A conveniently ran parallel to the town.” Plummet isn’t without its troubled past. Though long dead, the seedy figure of Thorn Mastema—“Besides gambling and loan sharking, the man was into child pornography, drugs, prostitution, and illegal abortions”—lives on in both the nursing home that still bears his name and his protégé, one Jason Torrent, who runs the place. When a 3-month-old baby goes missing, Torrent offers a $500,000 reward, even though Sheriff Samuels feels he is a prime suspect. It’s a suspicion that Samuels is warned against voicing. As the mayor explains, “You can’t start accusing a man like Torrent about a kidnapping.” Powerful, mysterious, and unpleasant in social situations, Torrent is not a man to be trifled with, but how else can the sheriff do his job? Populated with local characters, including a portly deputy and a kindhearted priest, the story incorporates everyday struggles and diabolical occurrences. For example, a book falls open to a page of a “drawing rendered in blood of a child with a dagger hovering over his heart, surrounded by six people with anguish and pain etched on their faces.” While certain portions involving occult practices may prove too obvious for some readers (“The Fourth Gateway of Hell shall be opened when Satan tastes the blood of a righteous one and an evil one”), those intrigued by a town with a streak of wickedness will feel right at home with the sheriff and his search for answers, particularly as the answers become ever more troubling.
Alive with a devilish plot, the book takes a satisfying, twisted journey into evil.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500518653
Page Count: 304
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
New York is colonized by giant talking canines in newcomer Bakis's wry variation on the traditional shaggy dog story. Imagination is the key here. We need to understand that at the end of the 19th century a crazed German biologist named Augustus Rank performed a succession of medical experiments that resulted in a weird genetic mutation of his subjects and created a race of ``monster dogs''—giant rottweilers and Dobermans who can speak and walk on their hind legs. After living for more than a hundred years in the seclusion of a remote Canadian settlement called Rankstadt, they are forced to move in the year 2008 to New York (where 150 of them take up residence at the Plaza Hotel) when Rankstadt is destroyed. In their 19th-century garb—Prussian military uniforms for the ``men,'' bustles for the ``women''—they cut impressive figures on the streets of Manhattan, where they quickly become celebrities and philanthropists. At Christmas they parade down Fifth Avenue in sleighs, and shortly after their arrival they construct an enormous Bavarian castle on the Lower East Side. When an NYU coed named Cleo Pira writes about them for a local newspaper, the dogs adopt her as their spokesperson and bring her into the inner life of their society. From Cleo's perspective the dogs are benign, quaint, and deeply tragic, and the more fascinated she becomes by their history—both as they relate it to her and as she discovers it for herself through Rank's own archives—the darker and more doomed their society appears. By the time Cleo has learned the secrets contained in Rank's past, it's too late to save his descendants, who have unknowingly brought about their own destruction. Serious enough, but also funny and imaginative: a vivid parable that manages to amuse even as it perplexes and intrigues.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-18987-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
Nobody writing today surpasses the precocious Waters’s virtuosic handling of narrative complexity and thickly textured...
Imagine a university-educated lesbian Charles Dickens with a similarly keen eye for mendacity and melodrama, and you’ll have some idea of the pleasures lurking in Waters’s impudent revisionist historicals: Tipping the Velvet (1999), Affinity (2000), and now this richly woven tale of duplicity, passion, and lots of other good stuff.
It begins as the narrative of 17-year-old Susan Trinder, an orphan resident of the criminal domicile run by Hogarthian Grace Sucksby, a Fagin-like “farmer” of discarded infants and den-mother to an extended family of “fingersmiths” (i.e., pickpockets) and assorted confidence-persons. One of the latter, Richard Rivers (a.k.a. “Gentleman”), engages Susan in an elaborate plot to fleece wealthy old Mr. Lilly, a connoisseur of rare books—as lady’s maid “Susan Smith” to Lilly’s niece and ward Maude, a “simple, natural” innocent who will be married off to “Mr. Rivers,” then disposed of in a madhouse, while the conspirators share her wealth. Maidservant and mistress grow unexpectedly close, until Gentleman’s real plan—a surprise no reader will see coming—leads to a retelling of events we’ve just witnessed, from a second viewpoint—which reveals the truth about Mr. Lilly’s bibliomania, and discloses to a second heroine that “Your life was not the life that you were meant to live.” (Misdirections and reversals are essential components of Waters’s brilliant plot, which must not be given away.) Further intrigues, escapes, and revelations climax when Susan (who has resumed her place as narrator) returns from her bizarre ordeal to Mrs. Sucksby’s welcoming den of iniquity, and a final twist of the knife precipitates another crime and its punishment, astonishing discoveries about both Maude and Susan (among others), and a muted reconciliation scene that ingeniously reshapes the conclusion of Dickens’s Great Expectations.
Nobody writing today surpasses the precocious Waters’s virtuosic handling of narrative complexity and thickly textured period detail. This is a marvelous novel.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2002
ISBN: 1-57322-203-8
Page Count: 493
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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