An edgy thriller that offends more than it entertains.
This detective-narrated mystery delves deep into a seedy criminal underworld to find out who murdered the saintly leader of a local charity.
Detective Diogenes “Sully” Sullivan is only weeks away from retiring and spending his remaining days drinking Irish whiskey in his room above Rosie’s bar—unless he runs off to Ireland to do the same thing there. His career has been littered with questionable activity and borderline corruption that has had Internal Affairs on his tail for years. However, his career gets its swan song when the body of Carmen Penn is found disguised as a drug-overdosed prostitute. Sully teams up with an enthusiastic new crime lab tech named Lisa to figure out who could have possibly wanted Carmen, the well-respected leader of a local charity, dead. Their journey to find the truth leads them to a strip club, seedy bars, a porn studio and other less-than-respectable establishments filled with a colorful, diverse cast of characters. Author O’Brian’s debut novel would keep readers on the edges of their seats if the narrator didn’t make them want to run for cover. The classic detective of Hammett and Chandler novels was, of course, colored with shades of gray, and he’d sacrifice niceties to solve cases, but here, Sully takes that trope too far with his sexist remarks. He constantly demeans women, as when he talks about Lisa’s curvy figure with vulgar slang, then berates her for swearing, since it’s apparently unbecoming of nice girls. Even worse, the women don’t seem to mind his attitude. Lisa occasionally talks back but mostly accepts his judgments, while a female visitor whom he dines with offers to clean up afterward: “That’s woman’s work,” she says. Readers who can stomach the misogyny might enjoy this pulpy, modern detective story, with its many twists and turns, but it could be rough going for some.
An edgy thriller that offends more than it entertains.Pub Date: July 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481823746
Page Count: 186
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.
In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.
In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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