A smart, satirically streaked novel.
Viktor Moroz, an engineer and well-known Jewish refusenik in mid-1970s Moscow, is offered a Faustian bargain by the KGB after he is seen fleeing a murder scene.
Viktor has discovered the dead bodies of his friend Albert Schwartz, a gay human rights activist and provider of goods and services, and a U.S. official with suspected ties to the CIA. They have both been killed with an ax. If he finds the murderer, Viktor will be allowed to leave the USSR along with his new wife, Oksana, a teacher and clandestine publisher. If he refuses to collaborate with the KGB, he will be put on trial for the murder himself—not a look the state wants with U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger soon arriving for nuclear talks. Viktor knows that the better naysayers like him are known in the West, the less likely it is they will be arrested. But he also is familiar with the documented theory that people who are threatened with prosecution in an antisemitic case like his “will eventually prevail.” The book is populated by spies, intellectuals, dissidents, diplomats, and others with secret lives including Madison “Mad Dog” Dymshitz, the shifty young Moscow bureau chief of an American newspaper, and Mikhail Kiselenko, a Russian Orthodox priest of Jewish descent. The Master and Margarita, The Cherry Orchard, and the samizdat literary movement play major roles here, as does The Laws of Jewish Life, a Canadian do-it-yourself guide to Judaism. The book sometimes bogs down in dialectics and broadsides: “Kissinger is about Kissinger. Kissinger would not have stood in the way of the Nazis throwing Jews in concentration camps, his own grandparents included.” But this is another strong performance by Goldberg—after The Yid (2016) and The Chateau (2018)—a master at dissecting divided souls.
A smart, satirically streaked novel.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781250208590
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.
Things are about to get bloody for a group of Charleston housewives.
In 1988, the scariest thing in former nurse Patricia Campbell’s life is showing up to book club, since she hasn’t read the book. It’s hard to get any reading done between raising two kids, Blue and Korey, picking up after her husband, Carter, a psychiatrist, and taking care of her live-in mother-in-law, Miss Mary, who seems to have dementia. It doesn’t help that the books chosen by the Literary Guild of Mt. Pleasant are just plain boring. But when fellow book-club member Kitty gives Patricia a gloriously trashy true-crime novel, Patricia is instantly hooked, and soon she’s attending a very different kind of book club with Kitty and her friends Grace, Slick, and Maryellen. She has a full plate at home, but Patricia values her new friendships and still longs for a bit of excitement. When James Harris moves in down the street, the women are intrigued. Who is this handsome night owl, and why does Miss Mary insist that she knows him? A series of horrific events stretches Patricia’s nerves and her Southern civility to the breaking point. (A skin-crawling scene involving a horde of rats is a standout.) She just knows James is up to no good, but getting anyone to believe her is a Sisyphean feat. After all, she’s just a housewife. Hendrix juxtaposes the hypnotic mundanity of suburbia (which has a few dark underpinnings of its own) against an insidious evil that has taken root in Patricia’s insular neighborhood. It’s gratifying to see her grow from someone who apologizes for apologizing to a fiercely brave woman determined to do the right thing—hopefully with the help of her friends. Hendrix (We Sold Our Souls, 2018, etc.) cleverly sprinkles in nods to well-established vampire lore, and the fact that he’s a master at conjuring heady 1990s nostalgia is just the icing on what is his best book yet.
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68369-143-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.
Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.
Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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