First-novelist Carnahan is a stylist who upgrades pulp to the Turkish-coffee richness of Cain, Hammett, and Chandler.
“She was Frigidaire cool, and I wanted her bad.” The Postman Always Rings Twice? Double Indemnity? No, Carnahan, a James M. Cain knockoff who knows the female of the species to be very dangerous.
Cain invented the novel that takes a profession—law, insurance—as deep background for a thriller. Here, Carnahan offers a deep understanding of life in a failing big-top circus. Bailey Quinn, 22, tossed out of college in his junior year, takes up “copping free”—or robbing stores by cutting through windows. He’s also into the big con, with plans to make a major theft, then return to college. And he’s a drug addict and drunk. He lands a summer job with a traveling circus that can’t always meet its payroll and is managed by an alcoholic owner who turns over management to the Freaks. The Freaks have a clear head for beating taxes by keeping the circus’s take in hard cash. Among them: the serpent girl, a busty and beautiful sexpot with no legs, one missing arm, and one short arm with a flipper, who is married to a mentally stunted giant. (Is this the ’30s classic flick Freaks? William Lindsay Greshman’s Nightmare Alley?) Bailey decides to rob the circus on the night before the weekly cash intake is shorted by the Freaks and banked. To find out which night that is, he romances the serpent girl. But he also falls for Sissy, a drug addict with wrecked veins but three years clean and sober, who takes him to an AA meeting that melts him to tears. “She had disappeared into the burning land of damage and risen again, whole and somehow fortified, like porcelain from the kiln. I was still somewhere deep in the smoldering wreckage. The only thing I could do was drag her back in; there was no potential upside to time spent with me.”
First-novelist Carnahan is a stylist who upgrades pulp to the Turkish-coffee richness of Cain, Hammett, and Chandler.Pub Date: March 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6270-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
A rollicking first novel from British journalist Hornby that manages to make antic hay of a young (barely) man's hopeless resolve not to come of age. Rob Fleming is the sort of precocious loser whose life has gone so unaccountably wrong that some deep romantic grief must be invoked to explain it. ``The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking,'' according to Rob, ``are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.'' As a case in point, the 35-year-old Rob not only listens to these songs himself but peddles themas the founder and proprietor of Championship Vinyl, a seedy vintage-record store in a quiet back alley of North London. Business is hardly booming these days, and the shop would have gone under long ago but for Rob's lawyer- girlfriend Laura, who has propped it up time and again with cash from her own very ample pool. Once she dumps Rob, however, everything is suddenly on the verge of collapsefiscally and emotionallyand Rob is forced to ask himself how he landed in such a mess. Naturally, he has no idea, so he proceeds to look up his ex-girlfriendsall the way back to high schooland ask them why things never worked out. As a pilgrimage, Rob's quest bears more resemblance to Monty Python than Chaucer, and his own inability to put two and two together somehow endears him to the very women whose affections he seems least able to requite. Reality bludgeons him in the end, and he succeeds, as the plot is spun, in drawing a few morals that surprise him by their simplicity and point toward a happy endingor at least a second chance. Fast, fun, and remarkably deft: a sharp-edged portrait that manages at once to be vicious, generous, and utterly good-natured.
Pub Date: Sept. 5, 1995
ISBN: 1-57322-016-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A strange, subtle, and haunting novel.
A financier's Ponzi scheme unravels to disastrous effect, revealing the unexpected connections among a cast of disparate characters.
How did Vincent Smith fall overboard from a container ship near the coast of Mauritania, fathoms away from her former life as Jonathan Alkaitis' pretend trophy wife? In this long-anticipated follow-up to Station Eleven (2014), Mandel uses Vincent's disappearance to pick through the wreckage of Alkaitis' fraudulent investment scheme, which ripples through hundreds of lives. There's Paul, Vincent's half brother, a composer and addict in recovery; Olivia, an octogenarian painter who invested her retirement savings in Alkaitis' funds; Leon, a former consultant for a shipping company; and a chorus of office workers who enabled Alkaitis and are terrified of facing the consequences. Slowly, Mandel reveals how her characters struggle to align their stations in life with their visions for what they could be. For Vincent, the promise of transformation comes when she's offered a stint with Alkaitis in "the kingdom of money." Here, the rules of reality are different and time expands, allowing her to pursue video art others find pointless. For Alkaitis, reality itself is too much to bear. In his jail cell, he is confronted by the ghosts of his victims and escapes into "the counterlife," a soothing alternate reality in which he avoided punishment. It's in these dreamy sections that Mandel's ideas about guilt and responsibility, wealth and comfort, the real and the imagined, begin to cohere. At its heart, this is a ghost story in which every boundary is blurred, from the moral to the physical. How far will Alkaitis go to deny responsibility for his actions? And how quickly will his wealth corrupt the ambitions of those in proximity to it? In luminous prose, Mandel shows how easy it is to become caught in a web of unintended consequences and how disastrous it can be when such fragile bonds shatter under pressure.
A strange, subtle, and haunting novel.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-52114-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
