A nice take on reporting before it got respectable.
Following a trail of evidence that begins with dead cats and winds through seamy cellars into the poshest Protestant parlors, a Jewish reporter lays bare some of the worst horrors of 19th-century New York.
It’s 1893, and Max Greengrass, born in Europe but as new-world and big-city as they come, writes freelance for the Herald, hoping desperately to go on salary as a regular reporter. And he may have the story (the novel’s based on an actual case) that will help him make the leap. Someone has been doing in the feral cats of Manhattan, leaving their bodies in neat rows on the stoops of the wild city’s many bawdy houses. Liberally laying on the spectacularly grubby details of life in the streets, second-novelist Blaine (The Desperate Season, 1999) situates his hard-drinking and nervy young hero in a boardinghouse between two beautiful young ladies, lovely leftist Belle Rose and zaftig photographer Gretta Sealy, both of whose charms will soften the black moments that follow Max’s discovery of a brutally slain young insurance magnate and the dismembered pieces of the supposedly deaf-and-dumb witness to that murder. The murders are related to the feline foul play that Max has been watching unfold as seemingly respectable society matrons walk the streets at night, dosing stray kitties with chloroform and then snapping their necks. Teaming up with free-loading senior reporter Nicholas Biddle, Max learns that the ladies are involved with something called the Midnight Band of Mercy, with ties to one of the most fashionable churches in town—a church that holds title to some of the most horrifying tenements anywhere, so that the cats are just the tip of the iceberg. The ladies are also involved with far greater evil, crimes that will endanger Max’s much-loved infant nephew, who is entrusted by his careless mother, Max’s show-biz sister Faye, to the most frightening day-care imaginable: a baby farm in one of those church-owned dumps.
A nice take on reporting before it got respectable.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-56947-371-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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