A sexy, energetic page-turner just one heavy edit away from mass-market appeal.
In Lando’s debut novel, a former porn star tries to escape her sordid past, but she can’t seem to shake the violence and political intrigue that follow in her wake.
The trauma of an abortion drives a jilted teenager toward the porn industry in Los Angeles, where she falls under the purview of a powerful, violent operator who dabbles in human trafficking. Meanwhile, a charismatic congressman is on his way to becoming the nation’s second black, first independent-party president, with the help of his beautiful, cutthroat advisor. Eventually, the storylines intersect. Throughout the novel, parallels are made between the porn industry and politics: both are industries in which things are accomplished through manipulation. There’s plenty of action, with satisfying amounts of sex, violence and suspense. Most of the characters are colorful and well developed, even the minor ones like a Mexican gangster or a righteous, busybody next-door neighbor in a small Midwestern town. The craving for love or acceptance that underpins all the characters’ actions makes them engaging and sympathetic. However, the book is prevented from truly taking off by its fatal tendency to indulge in excessive exposition. In church, main character Cristal Caprice (trying to live a new life as Bianca Nubreze), thinks to herself: “Do I have on too much makeup? Is my dress too revealing?” Then, the narration sticks in a clunky passage of telling, not showing: “It was a huge step for Bianca to show up in church, so everything, including how she dressed, turned into an internal struggle.” Later, an angry, lovelorn secondary character named Solae attacks and holds Cristal at gunpoint. Exasperatingly, the narration feels compelled to slow down what would be a high-drama scene by unnecessarily summarizing everything that just happened: “It was the hardest thing Solae had ever done—to attack Cristal and hold her at gunpoint.” If the author were to trim away the redundant, overly long explanations that bloat many paragraphs, then this tight, fast-paced thriller could hold its own against anything sold in mainstream bookstores.
A sexy, energetic page-turner just one heavy edit away from mass-market appeal.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-1462024872
Page Count: 400
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
