Ten heavy-handed parables, mostly cartoonish and occasionally stomach-turning—aimed at such worthy but obvious contemporary targets as homelessness, pollution, militarism, nuclear power, right-wing religions, and Nancy Reagan. None of these preachy farces is thought-provoking or genuinely horrific, but a few do conjure up images that are undeniably nauseating. In "The Mysterious Cemetery," cavalier medical research on cancer leads to an outbreak of huge earth-tumors in the neighborhood. "Nabuti: Warm Welcome to a UN Committee" is a sickening sketch—dead bodies festering in jammed elevators—of what can happen when an African land is given independence and modern technology. . .and then left to stew in ignorance, greed, and brutality. And "Trouble at the Jade Towers" offers a posh Manhattan hi-rise besieged by relentless, ever-larger cockroaches. Elsewhere, however, Highsmith's stories lack such vividly revolting specifics—and are merely transparent and dull. Whale-hunters get their just deserts when their quarry latches onto some modern human weaponry ("Moby Dick II; or The Missile Whale"). The government tries to dispose of nuclear waste in new, secret underground vaults—with predictably disastrous results. The homeless masses—mostly de-institutionalized mental patients—converge on the White House lawn. A new Pope starts a global revolution by suddenly announcing that abortion and birth control (among other things) are okay. And, in the book's overlong final entry, a Reagan-like President is bedeviled by an arms-for-hostages scandal—until his Scotch-swilling First Lady simplifies things by pushing the button that begins nuclear war with Russia. As political satire, then, these scenarios lack both imagination and depth—not to mention laughs. (An average Saturday Night Live skit is both funnier and subtler.) As futuristic horror, one or two of them are only slightly more successful. Together with the shaky novel Found in the Street and other recent story collections, these crude tales suggest that Highsmith—once such a powerful storyteller—is no longer in full artistic control of her morbidity and misanthropy.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1988
ISBN: 0802145639
Page Count: 273
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1988
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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