A gripping yarn for armchair adventurers.
A Canadian lawyer gets drawn into Mexico’s contemporary revolutionary struggle in this thriller.
In 2001, Ted Sorenson’s life is one that’s full of “bad decisions,” including a “bad marriage.” He reluctantly visits a spa in the Mexican countryside, looking for a new lease on life. En route, he meets and falls for an American woman who identifies herself as Barbara Jones, a brokerage firm’s bookkeeper. But at the border, she tells customs officials that her name is Bailey. When readers next see her, she’s purchasing a Smith & Wesson .30-caliber pistol and hollow-point bullets in Tecate. It turns out that she has some unfinished business involving Capitán Hernandez, a sadistic Mexican army general who led the 1997 slaughter of 45 villagers in Acteal, where Bailey was working at the time. She survived the attack but not before enduring unspeakable abuses, harrowingly revealed as the book progresses. Soon after Ted agrees to help her, he’s arrested; after Bailey breaks him out of jail, she discovers that there’s an international warrant out for his capture. The action escalates, and later Bailey kills a gunman and saves the life of Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the revolutionary Zapatistas, “a legend in his own time.” She then tries to get Marcos, who was also at Acteal, to kill Hernandez. Cuddy’s posthumously published debut novel is based on the actual Acteal massacre, and other figures, such as Marcos and the Zapatistas, are also drawn from real life. However, it also has a propulsive, noirish quality, as it tells the story of a good man and a woman with a tortured past who draws him into extraordinary events that test his mettle. Cuddy’s descriptions of the landscape, village culture, and the Zapatistas’ militant crusade all feel authentic. By comparison, Hernandez’s posturing villainy seems a bit overly broad, but Cuddy does devise credible, hard-earned fates for each of his vivid characters.
A gripping yarn for armchair adventurers.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9958689-0-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Chester House Press
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The secrets of the past refuse to keep quiet in this disquieting, taut thriller.
Thirty years ago, Seattle Police Capt. Edward Shank put down a serial killer dubbed the Butcher. Edward’s bullet ended Rufus Wedge’s sorry life. But did the killings end?
Hillier’s (Freak, 2012, etc.) third thriller fairly shudders with tension. Edward is ready to retire to an assisted living facility and give his grandson, Matt, the family home, a beloved Victorian in a posh neighborhood. An up-and-coming chef, Matt has parlayed his successful food-truck business into Adobo, the hottest restaurant in town, and the reality show networks are calling. The only trouble is that his girlfriend, Samantha, can’t understand why Matt hasn’t invited her to move in, too. After all, they’ve been together for three years. Pressuring Matt, though, isn’t getting her anywhere, and even their friend—well, really Sam’s friend—Jason is a little mystified. Certainly, Matt’s history of anger management trouble gives Jason pause. While Matt renovates the house and works late, Sam turns back to researching her latest true-crime book. This time, she has a personal investment. She’s convinced that her mother was killed by the notorious Butcher. Bored at the retirement home, Edward has become an invaluable sounding board. Like the Butcher’s other victims, Sam’s mother was raped, strangled and left in a shallow grave. Unfortunately for Sam’s theory, her mother was killed two years after Rufus Wedge’s death. Meanwhile, Matt’s contractor has unearthed a crate filled with gruesome artifacts. As Matt investigates the crate’s contents and Sam questions a mysterious informant, their romance unravels and the body count begins to rise. Hillier sends her reader into a labyrinth of creepy twists and grotesque turns. There’s no escape from the brutal truths exposed.
The secrets of the past refuse to keep quiet in this disquieting, taut thriller.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3421-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
A crime slowly unmasks a small town’s worth of resentment and yearning.
A hit-and-run in the Mojave Desert dismantles a family and puts a structurally elegant mystery in motion.
In her fourth book, Lalami is in thrilling command of her narrative gifts, reminding readers why The Moor’s Account (2014) was a Pulitzer finalist. Here, she begins in the voice of Nora Guerraoui, a nascent jazz composer, who recalls: "My father was killed on a spring night four years ago, while I sat in the corner booth of a new bistro in Oakland.” She was drinking champagne at the time. Nora’s old middle school band mate, Jeremy Gorecki, an Iraq War veteran beset with insomnia, narrates the next chapter. He hears about the hit-and-run as he reports to work as a deputy sheriff. The third chapter shifts to Efraín Aceves, an undocumented laborer who stops in the dark to adjust his bicycle chain and witnesses the lethal impact. Naturally, he wants no entanglement with law enforcement. With each chapter, the story baton passes seamlessly to a new or returning narrator. Readers hear from Erica Coleman, a police detective with a complacent husband and troubled son; Anderson Baker, a bowling-alley proprietor irritated over shared parking with the Guerraoui’s diner; the widowed Maryam Guerraoui; and even the deceased Driss Guerraoui. Nora’s parents fled political upheaval in Casablanca in 1981, roughly a decade before Lalami left Morocco herself. In the U.S., Maryam says, “Above all, I was surprised by the talk shows, the way Americans loved to confess on television.” The author, who holds a doctorate in linguistics, is precise with language. She notices the subtle ways that words on a diner menu become dated, a match to the décor: “The plates were gray. The water glasses were scratched. The gumball machine was empty.” Nuanced characters drive this novel, and each voice gets its variation: Efraín sarcastic, Nora often argumentative, Salma, the good Guerraoui daughter, speaks with the coiled fury of the duty-bound: “You’re never late, never sick, never rude.” The ending is a bit pat, but Lalami expertly mines an American penchant for rendering the “other.”
A crime slowly unmasks a small town’s worth of resentment and yearning.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4715-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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