But you didn’t really need to read a word of this, since Spillane is by any measure the most review-proof name in the genre,...
Though midcentury publishing phenom Spillane died 10 years ago, his notorious hero Mike Hammer lives again in these eight reprints of short stories completed by his latter-day collaborator Collins (Kill Me, Darling, 2015, etc.) and published, mostly in the Strand Magazine, over the past eight years.
Though the stories take hard-boiled Hammer from the 1960s through the ’90s, extending his engagement to his girl Friday, Velda Sterling, into record territory, both Hammer and the plots that feature him are as consistent as Miller Lite. Following a violent opening tableau (a third attempt on Hammer’s life in “Fallout,” a horrifyingly mutilated corpse in “Skin”), Hammer either gets hired to investigate or, more often, vows revenge on his own (“The Big Switch” and “Grave Matter”). Leading with his .45, Hammer identifies the criminal as either his own client or the only suspect he’s taken the time to question and, in his trademark end run around the vicissitudes of the justice system, executes the malefactor himself, as in “A Long Time Dead.” Variety is provided, for those readers so inclined, by the heartfelt opening of “So Long, Chief,” in which Hammer’s farewell visit to the dying retired cop who set him on his career path when he was a child makes him the target of every criminal in Gotham; the pitch-perfect final line of the otherwise routine story “A Dangerous Cat”; and the piquant setup of “It’s in the Book,” which Collins rightly identifies as the best of these stories: first the cops (in a delicious scene) and then the crooks hire Hammer to recover a late mobster’s little black book.
But you didn’t really need to read a word of this, since Spillane is by any measure the most review-proof name in the genre, and you’ll have known perfectly well from the get-go whether or not you want to plunge into these not-quite-new adventures.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3609-2
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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