Buck Carlsbad is a private investigator, a medium and an exorcist.
Romano joins Melton and Dunstan, creators of the Saw film franchise, to pen a fantasy crime, or crime as fantasy, novel. The book opens with Buck exorcising the ghost of a child murderer haunting the New Orleans residence of his widow. The authors offer bits of Buck’s back story as he cruises home to Texas. As a child, Buck was abandoned in Carlsbad, N.M., and sent to an orphanage. As a teen, his gift becomes evident when he sees a ghost plaguing an attendant. The Pull draws that evil woman into Buck, and he experiences the Black Light—“the vision of the dead”—before ridding himself of the tortured soul by vomiting her evil plasma onto her gravesite. Home from his New Orleans Pull, Buck is enlisted by industrialist Sidney Jaeger. The billionaire has built a high-speed bullet train to run from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. It will travel at 400-mph-plus across the California desert through an area triangulated by former sites of three maximum-security prisons, grounds where uncounted evil ghosts lurk. Carrying a crowd of celebrities and one very important politician, the super train breaks records rocketing from L.A. to Vegas while Buck rides along battling rogue government agents, backstabbing friends and the evil shades of “Blackjack Nine,” whose leader killed Buck’s parents. The authors are fond of overwrought descriptive language—“bringing the spirit in with a gutterspewing thunder that feels like a toilet flush tremor bolting to the core of the Earth”—random clichés and capital-letter bold statements as they unpack the action and dish out eye-gouging marital-arts battles, dislocated pinkies, shootouts and gut-retching exorcisms. Buck on the screen will require major CGI skills.
Not for Potter or Twilight fans. It’s Ghostbusters with bloody mayhem on steroids, few laughs and a dash of Bruce Lee theatrics.
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-19671-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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