While the sad world of an over-the-hill, out-of-work actor comes across depressingly well and the mystery’s solution is...
Superstar Corky Henderson is murdered and his former friend Frank Callington feels compelled to find the killer in Le Mat’s debut mystery.
Callington, an out-of-work actor, suspects his friend Ray killed Corky. The three men had starred in a ’70s blockbuster, though only Corky found stardom. Callington and Ray, angry and resentful that Corky offered little to help their careers, complain about him often, including one conversation in which Callington remarked to Ray that Corky should be killed. When Corky is murdered two weeks later, Callington fears Ray might have gone through with it. Obsessed with discovering the truth, Callington interviews witnesses, obtains the police file, stakes out a house every day for a week, and even suffers a serious beating during his vigilant investigation. The real (and unsolved) mystery here is why Callington, not a suspect himself, is willing to go through all of this to find the killer of a man he didn’t particularly like. Apparently, they weren’t even that close. Le Mat’s stream-of-consciousness narrative, in which the reader is privy to every thought—significant or mundane—in Callington’s head makes Callington’s lonely, depressed interior life come through loud and clear. But by choosing to summarize rather than actually detail most of the book’s crucial conversations and confrontations, Le Mat misses many opportunities to bring the narrative to life. Characterization is also lax; women, for instance, are described only as “well-endowed and black” or “low-cut and lovely as usual.” With prose like that, it’s hard to see the characters as anything but types. And while women are said to find Callington attractive, some readers may find that hard to believe about a guy who introduces himself to a woman he’s just met with “You’re hot, did you know that?”
While the sad world of an over-the-hill, out-of-work actor comes across depressingly well and the mystery’s solution is plausible, the work is fleshed out as a promising first draft rather than a finished product.Pub Date: June 26, 2010
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Le Mat Films
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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