Beautiful and chilling—a brilliant debut.
In Tomkins’ (Dynasty: Fifty Years of Shankly’s Liverpool, 2013, etc.) novel, a forensic artist’s romantic obsessions and traumatic past rise to the surface as he works on a cold case.
Patrick Clement has been tasked by authorities with reconstructing the face of a young, unknown victim named “Marina,” found murdered many years before on a pier in the English seaside resort of Brighton. With his marriage in shreds, Patrick moves into the cottage given to him by his aunt, the terminally ill Kitty. Surrounded again by memories of a tragic childhood (including a mother who committed suicide and a father who died an alcoholic), Patrick works to shed light on the identity of the mysterious woman, even as his thoughts revolve around some significant women who’ve disappeared from his own life: his mother, a young Frenchwoman he met as a teenager in London, and a troubled teenage girl that his Aunt Kitty once took in to live with them. In particular, Patrick’s thoughts drift toward a young woman called Black, with whom he spent a memorable evening at the pier and who’s haunted him since their first meeting. He tries to trace the whereabouts of Black and consults the retired policeman for whom he’s working on the reconstruction. As the reconstruction nears completion, Patrick comes nearer and nearer to the truth. Tomkins’ prose is evocative and devastating. He portrays the Brighton beach beautifully—the facile amusements and giddiness of the holiday destination as well as the darkness that lies beneath, as when Patrick recalls walking there with his father as a child after he’d been abandoned by his mother: “From a vendor beside a Punch and Judy show he bought me an ice cream, but not even its sweetness could distract from my distress…he bought me a red balloon, which, like a beaten finalist, I carried as a worthless consolation prize.” Tomkins’ painstaking descriptions of the minutiae of Patrick’s forensic artistry are remarkable for their lyricism and for the insight that they provide into Patrick’s need to impose order on chaos: “She is evolving, returning to life….She is far from finished, but to someone, somewhere, she might already be alive.”
Beautiful and chilling—a brilliant debut.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78462-104-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Matador
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Thriller fans will delight in this latest escapade. Cussler and co-author Burcell have delivered a winner.
The 10th and latest Sam and Remi Fargo adventure (The Romanov Ransom, 2017, etc.) is a fast-paced tale that reaches back to the early days of automotive glory.
In Manchester, England, in 1906, the Gray Ghost has gone missing. That’s the Rolls-Royce prototype developed by Charles Rolls and Henry Royce, and the loss threatens to financially ruin them. They hire a detective to locate it, but he is murdered. In the present day, Sam and Remi Fargo hear about the car, which turned up after World War II but is now missing again. It's always been owned by the Payton family, which generations ago was the Oren-Payton family, and may be worth many millions of dollars. Raising the stakes even higher, the 1906 thieves may have hidden treasure inside the car, though there was no trace of it when the Gray Ghost was found after the war. But jealous modern-day cousin Arthur Oren has the car stolen and then loses track of it—has the thief he hired stolen it twice? It’s a complicated and clever plot, with Sam and Remi trying to find it for the current owner, Lord Albert Payton, Viscount Wellswick. The 1906 journal of Jonathon Payton, fifth Viscount Wellswick, provides a solid backstory. The Fargos are great series characters, whip-smart and altruistic self-made multimillionaires who can afford to take time from their charity work to dabble in dangerous adventures. Oren knows they’re involved, and he wants them both dead and the car returned. An accomplice suggests first making the Fargos destitute by freezing their bank accounts and credit cards. Then the bad guys can arrange a fake suicide. It’s fun to watch Sam and Remi get out of dicey scrapes, once by driving an Ahrens-Fox pumper fire engine out of a blazing building. Oren asks, “How hard is it to knock off two socialites?” He finds out the hard way; he should have just acquainted himself with Cussler’s series.
Thriller fans will delight in this latest escapade. Cussler and co-author Burcell have delivered a winner.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1873-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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