A paranoid’s delight: In middle life and still followed about by a cloud of foreboding, Linus Owens is a professor of conspiracy theory who is himself wrapped tight in an infinite cat’s cradle of suspicions about large-sum currency, cellular phones, faxes, large screen TVs, multiple CD changers, electronic organizers, the terrifying sound of his own wife, Claudia, steaming milk in their espresso machine. He’s sure that a clandestine cabal runs the world. Then, when Claudia is visiting her mother in Chicago, some FBI agents show up—and tell him that she has actually died in a plane that crashed on its way to Brazil. Brazil? In grief, Linus draws on fellow conspiracy theorists to uncover the tie between Claudia’s ad agency and the federal government. Why has he received a phone message in broken English telling what the hours in a Chinese restaurant are? Can fellow theorist Luther’s experimenting with cold fusion in hopes of building a black-hole bomb help Linus find out who murdered his wife—if she is indeed dead? Has he himself committed a federal crime and is he being recorded on grainy black-and-white film? Will we know more about the history and practice of applied fear as a means of governing after we read this brainodrama? A debut thriller with storytelling grip.
Pub Date: July 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-609-60280-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
Why is Sandford's new Kidd-series novel, The Empress File (p. 120; written under his real name of John Camp), so frazzled? Maybe because this increasingly popular author is putting his finest energies into his best-selling Lucas Davenport series (Rules of Prey, 1989; Shadow Prey, 1990)—as evidenced by this strong and satisfying entry, in which the Minneapolis homicide cop tangles with two memorable psycho-killers. The killers are coldhearted burn-deformed actor Carlo Druze and handsome pill-crazed pathologist Michael Bekker, who lures Druze into a murder trade a la Strangers on a Train: Bekker's wife for Druze's boss. The novel opens with Druze sneaking into Bekker's house to slice Stephanie Bekker and (at Bekker's insistence) to mutilate her eyes—but it turns out that Stephanie has a lover, who sees Druze, then runs away. Who is he? And why the eye mutilation? These questions plague moody, perennially unhappy Davenport as he deals with the case, and with his own demons of depression. Though from the start suspecting Bekker (whose drug-soaked soliloquies, and hidden obsession with observing dying patients' eyes at the moment of death, cast him as an unusually fascinating villain), Davenport can't figure out the mad M.D.'s connection to the second victim, Druze's boss, also found with punched-out eyes. So when the mysterious eyewitness begins feeding anonymous clues about a deformed killer, and then a third victim—an innocent mistakenly identified by Druze as the eyewitness—surfaces, Davenport looks elsewhere. His search brings him to Druze's theater company and to sexy actress Cassie Lasch, who becomes Davenport's lover and (inevitably in Sandford's dark universe) Bekker's final victim—along with Druze, whom Bekker double-crosses. In a brutal finale, a semi-deranged Davenport, throwing his cop-career away, extracts a savage revenge upon Bekker—a revenge that leads to a last-page revelation of the eyewitness's surprising identity. Atmospheric, suspenseful, and gripping from start to finish.
Pub Date: April 4, 1991
ISBN: 0425214435
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
Formulaic but fun.
Bad things are astir on the banks of the Big Muddy, hallmark territory for homeboy Iles (Mississippi Blood, 2017, etc.).
“Buck’s passing seems a natural place to begin this story, because that’s the way these things generally start.” Yep. This particular bit of mischief starts when a Scoutmaster, surrogate father, and all-around good guy gets his head bashed in and his body dumped into the Mississippi. And why? That’s the tangled tale that Iles weaves in this overlong but engaging yarn. Thanks to the back-room dealing of a bunch called the Poker Club, the little river-bluff city of Bienville has brought a Chinese paper pulp mill to town and, with it, a new interstate connection and a billion dollars—which, a perp growls, is a billion dollars “in Mississippi. That’s like ten billion in the real world.” But stalwart journalist Marshall McEwan—that’s McEwan, not McLuhan—is on the case, back in town after attaining fame in the big city, to which he’d escaped from the shadow of his journalist hero father, now a moribund alcoholic but with plenty of fire left. Marshall’s old pals and neighbors have been up to no good; the most powerful of them are in the club, including an old girlfriend named Jet, who is quick to unveil her tucked-away parts to Marshall and whose love affairs in the small town are the makings of a positively Faulknerian epic. Iles’ story is more workaday than all that and often by the numbers: The bad guys are really bad, the molls inviting (“she steals her kiss, a quick, urgent probing of the tongue that makes clear she wants more"), the politicians spectacularly corrupt, the cluelessly cuckolded—well, clueless and cuckolded, though not without resources for revenge. As Marshall teases out the story of murder most foul, other bodies litter the stage—fortunately not his, which, the club members make it plain, is very much an option. In the end, everyone gets just deserts, though with a few postmodernly ironic twists.
Formulaic but fun.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-282461-5
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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