A pulpy, imperfect sendup of moviemaking.
An American actor attempts to survive a chaotic South American movie shoot in Litchfield’s novel.
Dominic Graves’ career in Hollywood is not going as he’d hoped. The actor is now in his 30s, and good roles are hardly rolling in. (His most recent job was an ad for a car dealership.) When his disreputable agent Bernie Finkelman offers him the lead in a Uruguayan thriller, Dominic has little choice but to say yes and fly off for the 10-week shoot in Montevideo. There, the problems begin almost immediately. By the time he makes it to his first day of shooting—hungover and several hours late—he’s already slept with his gorgeous coworker, Sofía Prodova, and insulted her enough for her to beat him unconscious with an ashtray. Dominic then has to survive long days under the whip of the demanding and volatile director Ignacio Martinez, who is happy to put his actors in danger if it results in a better shot. “Death on a film set often turns a decent performance into a legendary one,” he tells Dominic ominously. Ignacio has his own longstanding and explosive relationship with Sofía, one that Dominic will have to navigate if he wants to end up in the final cut of A Bullet for Silver Face. (That is, assuming Dominic doesn’t actually have to take any bullets to his face.) Litchfield writes with sardonic vigor, capturing Dominic’s general distaste for his situation: “Bullets, explosions and bare-knuckle fistfights were continual, disconcerting distractions, and trying to remember lines while worried about being blown to smithereens was an eternal challenge.” But the reader struggles to sympathize with Dominic, who pours whiskey into his morning coffee and surprises his one-night stands with unwanted sexual maneuvers that make him feel powerful. The fact that all three of the main characters are both charmless and irredeemable keeps the book from being as funny—or as suspenseful—as Litchfield might have intended.
A pulpy, imperfect sendup of moviemaking.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781732332867
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Lowestoft Chronicle Press
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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