A tightly executed thriller and the high point of a great series.
In this third installment of his Travelers series, King’s (The Computer Heist, 2016, etc.) con-artist couple target a would-be politician.
The Traveling Man and his wife are in a town called Randal Junction. This time, he’s taken the name “George Harrison,” while she goes by “Roslyn.” They’re posing as married real estate agents to penetrate the ambitious life of banker Donald Honeycutt, who’s running for Congress. The con begins in earnest when Roslyn draws Honeycutt into a sexual affair, and George clandestinely films one of their trysts from a van. They later mail the banker a package containing a few steamy stills and a DVD of the event, which he nearly opens in front of his even-more-ambitious wife, Billie Honeycutt. They also send him a note demanding that he drop $10,000 into a mailbox each month, or they’ll tell Billie and the media everything. The con proceeds apace until Billie notices a missing $10,000 that no campaign business accounts for. Although she’s aware of her husband’s one weakness—women—she’d made him promise not to philander during the campaign. She sets a private eye named Stan Jessup on the banker’s trail to learn more. Roslyn, however, has a secret that radically alters the nature of the blackmail scheme—one that could make Randall Junction the Travelers’ last stop. For his third small-town thriller, King nearly undoes his ruthless couple by pitting them against an equally horrible duo. Billie, for example, is only with Donald because she “plans to go to Washington and take her wheeling and dealing to the next level without having to be in office herself.” As usual, King’s dialogue and secondary characters make for rich, pulpy reading; for example, when Sheriff Bo Teardale catches up with George, he reassures him by saying, “You’ve been watching too much TV. If I want you disappeared, you’ll disappear.” And even though King gives Donald the self-deprecating line, “It was the plot to a bad movie,” he masterfully crafts the deadly tangle of interpersonal alliances and their fallout. Although this volume could finish the Travelers’ tales, a sequel would be irresistible.
A tightly executed thriller and the high point of a great series.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Blurred Lines Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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