An entertaining crime yarn full of sly humor and unexpected uplift.
Two lost souls in Japan attempt to get their lives on track by running drugs in this caper novel.
Karpa’s tale follows characters living on the margins of an atmospheric Tokyo circa 1994. Floyd Conner, a 20-something gay American expatriate, smuggles a brick of hashish from Bangkok to help his lover, bar owner Arata, pay his debt to the yakuza. Conner is surprised to discover an attraction to his housemate, Katie, when she seduces him; later, he wakes up to find that Katie has stolen the hash and fled. When he tracks her down, she beats him up and gives him the slip again. He desperately tries to recoup his losses with a drug run to Hawaii on behalf of American ex–intelligence operative Paul Barkley. Along the way, Conner meets Marika Shirayama, a 30-year-old Japanese bar hostess who’s fleeing a stifling marriage and an awful mother-in-law. Paul ropes Marika into the Hawaiian trip to help him with a shady real estate deal he’s plotting, but she and Conner quickly recognize each other as kindred spirits and wind up in bed together, as well. When police nab Conner at the Tokyo airport, he and Marika become tangled in a web of betrayals. Karpa’s comic noir has the feel of an Elmore Leonard novel, with colorful grifters and creeps tangled in tawdry machinations in a vividly rendered demimonde. Tokyo is a vibrant setting of traditional niceties and crass modernity, where “the diesel-scented air flowing freely into [Conner’s] lungs felt excellent.” The mysteries are psychological and spiritual as well as conspiratorial, as much about Conner’s thoughts about his sexuality and Marika’s longing “to see the vastness of the earth” as they are about drug-smuggling schemes. Karpa renders amusing action and intricate procedures in spare, observant, and mordantly funny prose that finds meaning in every gesture, as when a woman bows “too low, as women her age always seemed to do, as though competing for a national title in submission.” Readers will root for Conner and Marika to make it through Customs unscathed.
An entertaining crime yarn full of sly humor and unexpected uplift.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73624-441-8
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Mumblers Press LLC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A weird, wild ride.
Celebrity scandal and a haunted lake drive the narrative in this bestselling author’s latest serving of subtly ironic suspense.
Sager’s debut, Final Girls (2017), was fun and beautifully crafted. His most recent novels—Home Before Dark (2020) and Survive the Night (2021) —have been fun and a bit rickety. His new novel fits that mold. Narrator Casey Fletcher grew up watching her mother dazzle audiences, and then she became an actor herself. While she never achieves the “America’s sweetheart” status her mother enjoyed, Casey makes a career out of bit parts in movies and on TV and meatier parts onstage. Then the death of her husband sends her into an alcoholic spiral that ends with her getting fired from a Broadway play. When paparazzi document her substance abuse, her mother exiles her to the family retreat in Vermont. Casey has a dry, droll perspective that persists until circumstances overwhelm her, and if you’re getting a Carrie Fisher vibe from Casey Fletcher, that is almost certainly not an accident. Once in Vermont, she passes the time drinking bourbon and watching the former supermodel and the tech mogul who live across the lake through a pair of binoculars. Casey befriends Katherine Royce after rescuing her when she almost drowns and soon concludes that all is not well in Katherine and Tom’s marriage. Then Katherine disappears….It would be unfair to say too much about what happens next, but creepy coincidences start piling up, and eventually, Casey has to face the possibility that maybe some of the eerie legends about Lake Greene might have some truth to them. Sager certainly delivers a lot of twists, and he ventures into what is, for him, new territory. Are there some things that don’t quite add up at the end? Maybe, but asking that question does nothing but spoil a highly entertaining read.
A weird, wild ride.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18319-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.
The ne’er-do-well son of a successful Irish American family gets dragged into criminal complications that suggest the rest of the Devlins aren’t exactly the upstanding citizens they appear.
The first 35 years in the life of Thomas “TJ” Devlin have been one disappointment after another to his parents, lawyers who founded a prosperous insurance and reinsurance firm, and his more successful siblings, John and Gabby. A longtime alcoholic who’s been unemployable ever since he did time for an incident involving his ex-girlfriend Carrie’s then 2-year-old daughter, TJ is nominally an investigator for Devlin & Devlin, but everyone knows the post is a sinecure. Things change dramatically when golden-boy John tells TJ that he just killed Neil Lemaire, an accountant for D&D client Runstan Electronics. Their speedy return to the murder scene reveals no corpse, so the brothers breathe easier—until Lemaire turns up shot to death in his car. John’s way of avoiding anything that might jeopardize his status as heir apparent to D&D is to throw TJ under the bus, blaming him for everything John himself has done and adding that you can’t trust anything his brother has said since he’s fallen off the wagon. TJ, who’s maintained his sobriety a day at a time for nearly two years, feels outraged, but neither the police investigating the murder nor his nearest and dearest care about his feelings. Forget the forgettable mystery, whose solution will leave you shrugging instead of gasping, and focus on the circular firing squad of the Devlins, and you’ll have a much better time than TJ.
As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780525539704
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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