Deliverance in Vegas, with cinematic flourishes of violence and rough justice.
Four friends go on a gambling trip to Las Vegas and bring back more than they bargained for.
You’re minding your own business, and some rich guy’s wallet literally lands at your feet—what do you do? In 1984, Tommy Sullivan is sitting on a toilet in the men’s room of a casino when the man in the stall next to him drops his trousers, and his wallet spills out onto the floor. Tommy’s choice to snag the wallet and quickly leave the restroom nets him a significant amount of cash and some serious peril as the wallet’s owner, Fausto D’Angelo, a man operating on the edges of organized crime (“A damp, unlit cigar protruded from the left corner of his lips. He wore a tailored, blue three piece suit that probably fit him a year ago. Now the buttons of his vest strained against his ample belly”) seeks to identify the thief and get his money back—and then some. Tommy’s in Vegas with his little brother, Ricky, and two of their regular poker pals, Jared and Eric. They’re there ostensibly to celebrate Ricky graduating from the Boston Police Academy and beginning his new career as a police officer, and maybe to get him some real-life experience with women. Ricky’s naivete results in him falling for Jenny May, a similarly gullible stripper recently arrived from Tennessee. Tommy’s decision to take what’s not his puts all of their lives in danger, and the trouble follows them all the way back home to Boston (Fausto’s doesn’t adhere to the credo ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’). The author’s ear for accents, whether South Boston or East Tennessee, doesn’t translate well to the page, but his sense of the psychological stressors that influence each character’s moral decision-making, from mobster to record store clerk to bullying older brother to young Catholic cop, is pitch-perfect. The pacing is taut but not hurried; each character’s inner sense of right and wrong, balanced against their actions in the moment, keeps the novel barreling toward its inexorable showdown.
Deliverance in Vegas, with cinematic flourishes of violence and rough justice.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2023
ISBN: 9798850642525
Page Count: -
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.
A series of mounting complications leads to yet another fight to the death between the discarded intelligence agents of Slough House and the morally bankrupt head of MI5.
As Jackson Lamb’s motley crew on Aldersgate Street struggles to cope with the deaths of River Cartwright’s grandfather and mentor, intelligence veteran David Cartwright, and their dim, beloved colleague Min Harper, new troubles are brewing. Diana Taverner, who runs the British Intelligence Service from Regent’s Park, is being blackmailed by former MP Peter Judd to do his bidding. Nothing untoward about that, of course, but this time, Judd’s demands, backed by a compromising tape recording, are more pressing than usual. So Diana reconvenes the Brains Trust—Al Hawke, Avril Potts, Daisy Wessex, and their ex-boss Charles Cornell Stamoran—whose last assignment was to serve as the contact for psychopathic IRA informant Dougie Malone while turning a blind eye to his multiple rapes and murders, which were really none of the Crown’s business. Taverner’s new assignment for the Brains Trust is the assassination of Judd. Since all these developments are filtered through the riotously cynical lens of Herron’s imagination, nothing goes as planned, and when the smoke clears, the fatalities don’t include Judd. Now that Judd knows he has as much reason to fear Taverner as she does to fear him, Lamb offers to broker a peace meeting between them which Slough House computer geek Roddy Ho will keep secret by knocking out 37 security cameras around Taverner’s dwelling. What could possibly go wrong?
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781641297264
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PROFILES
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