This bracing thriller features an intriguing cast and a realistic plot.
In this sequel, an oil company succeeds despite a dysfunctional chairman, until someone kills him.
The year is 1981. More than a decade has passed since the murderous Captain Courageous stalked Randy Capra halfway around the world. Randy now lives outside Lorain, Ohio, with his wife, Monique, and their three children. He’s the vice president of operations for the DeVille Petroleum Company. When one of its oil wells in Caddo County, Oklahoma, erupts in flames, two DPC workers die instantly while four are critically injured. It takes a week to gain control of the accident site and yet company chairman Dick DeVille isn’t thankful for Randy’s expertise and leadership. He instead complains that Randy took DPC’s plane to the burning well. But Randy knows that the wrong size blowout preventer, suggested by Dick, caused the accident. Company president Bobby Wendover defends Randy’s actions while Dick threatens to fire him. Later, at the DPC Christmas party, organized by Axel Eriksen, liquor flows freely and stripper Marilyn Moore makes the rounds. After the party, when cleaner Graciela Estevez enters the chairman’s office, she finds Dick at his desk with his pants down and his head bashed in. She calls Randy, the only employee she knows who speaks any Spanish. The author revisits his trouble-magnet protagonist of Hunted (2012) at a more secure place in his life, a family man at the dawn of the Reagan era. Wood’s (The Hoo-Li Chronicles, 2019, etc.) knowledge of the oil industry gives the plot weight, as in the line “Dick had told him what specifications his buddies in Houston had suggested, insisting he save money by using a ‘normal’ blowout preventer.” This sequel is also structured more confidently than its predecessor, with richly drawn characters, like the dogged and sympathetic Lt. Jack Grueden, thundering through a traditional whodunit. Still, “sex” remains the operative word at the DPC office because there are enough extramarital liaisons and related fights to win over fans of the soap opera Dallas. While the murder weapon is slightly telegraphed early on, the killer is skillfully hidden until the finale.
This bracing thriller features an intriguing cast and a realistic plot.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-387-33585-5
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A perfectly balanced portrait of the human condition, encompassing plenty of anger, cruelty and loss without ever losing...
The abrasive, vulnerable title character sometimes stands center stage, sometimes plays a supporting role in these 13 sharply observed dramas of small-town life from Strout (Abide with Me, 2006, etc.).
Olive Kitteridge certainly makes a formidable contrast with her gentle, quietly cheerful husband Henry from the moment we meet them both in “Pharmacy,” which introduces us to several other denizens of Crosby, Maine. Though she was a math teacher before she and Henry retired, she’s not exactly patient with shy young people—or anyone else. Yet she brusquely comforts suicidal Kevin Coulson in “Incoming Tide” with the news that her father, like Kevin’s mother, killed himself. And she does her best to help anorexic Nina in “Starving,” though Olive knows that the troubled girl is not the only person in Crosby hungry for love. Children disappoint, spouses are unfaithful and almost everyone is lonely at least some of the time in Strout’s rueful tales. The Kitteridges’ son Christopher marries, moves to California and divorces, but he doesn’t come home to the house his parents built for him, causing deep resentments to fester around the borders of Olive’s carefully tended garden. Tensions simmer in all the families here; even the genuinely loving couple in “Winter Concert” has a painful betrayal in its past. References to Iraq and 9/11 provide a somber context, but the real dangers here are personal: aging, the loss of love, the imminence of death. Nonetheless, Strout’s sensitive insights and luminous prose affirm life’s pleasures, as elderly, widowed Olive thinks, “It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.”
A perfectly balanced portrait of the human condition, encompassing plenty of anger, cruelty and loss without ever losing sight of the equally powerful presences of tenderness, shared pursuits and lifelong loyalty.Pub Date: April 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6208-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
PERSPECTIVES
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