A slow start, hypnotic storyline, and overly neat ending make this not one of Daly’s best.
A woman strikes a deal with a very rich lover and lives to regret it.
Roz Toovey, a divorced physiotherapist, stands on the verge of losing everything she has. She’s deep in debt and has no idea where she’ll get the money to pay her bills. When bailiffs show up and take everything from her place but the kitchen sink, Roz and her little boy, George, contemplate a bleak future. Enter the wealthy Scott Elias. A friend of Roz’s sister and brother-in-law, Scott has a picture-perfect marriage to Nadine. The golden couple jet-set around and hold expensive parties, but Scott doesn’t care about all that. He wants Roz, and he’s willing to pay for the experience. Scott offers Roz a ridiculous amount of money to have sex with him—no strings attached—and Roz, desperate to keep a roof over her head, takes him up on it. But there’s a catch: Wayne, Roz’s boss at the clinic where she works, has found some money missing, and, having figured out her arrangement with Scott, he wants part of the action or he'll pin the theft on her. Roz meets him at his place and agrees to a one-time sexual encounter, but things go awry, and when she gets to work on Monday, Wayne is missing. Then Roz is left to figure out how much the police know about her, as well as deal with Scott’s increasing demands. Daly’s stories are always compelling but rarely plausible, and this one’s no exception. This time she includes too much detail about physiotherapy (providing, for example, a detailed explanation of sciatica, even though the condition is immaterial to the story) and creates a highly flawed and morally compromised protagonist, making it difficult to empathize with her. Although it takes too long to get the narrative ball rolling, Daly heats things up fast from there.
A slow start, hypnotic storyline, and overly neat ending make this not one of Daly’s best.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2409-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
This well-told, suspenseful tale will appeal to fans of Deadwood and Cormac McCarthy.
The Irish Republican Brotherhood battles the British in Victorian England.
Like McGuire’s second novel, The North Water (2016, etc.), longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this violent, noirish tale focuses on two men: policeman James O’Connor and Irish rebel Stephen Doyle. It's Nov. 22, 1867, in Manchester, and "the sky is the color of wet mortar." Three Fenians—members of a secret society working for Irish independence—are about to be hung for killing an English policeman. (McGuire based this on a true story but made up everything that came after.) A group of policemen are discussing the hangings, and there’s talk of reprisals; later, an informant says he's heard about a man coming from America “to wreak some havoc, that’s what they say.” The man is Doyle, a Union soldier from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A “strange bastard,” he meets with some Fenians and is told about O'Connor, a Head Constable who was brought over from Dublin a few months ago to assist the Manchester police in spying on the Fenians. O’Connor’s wife, Catherine, recently died and he turned to drink. Now an abstainer, he’s a “man maligned, a victim of ignorance and English prejudice.” O’Connor is beaten at night and key pages from his police notebook, stolen. Complicating matters, another transplant, O’Connor’s nephew Michael Sullivan, has come to Manchester from New York. Against O’Connor’s wishes, he infiltrates the Fenians to become an informer. O’Connor becomes infatuated with Rose Flanagan, whose brother Tommy is one of his informants. There’s talk of an audacious Fenian revenge plot, but they’ll need handguns. Reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, McGuire’s taut, intricately woven novel captures the aura of a dark, violent world riddled with terrorism and revenge, where a “man’s life on its own is nothing much to talk about.”
This well-told, suspenseful tale will appeal to fans of Deadwood and Cormac McCarthy.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13387-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Though one of Box’s plot twists pays off in spades, most of them don’t, and the latest round of Joe’s unending domestic...
Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett (Blood Trail, 2008, etc.) is at it again.
Six years ago, April Keeley, the abandoned girl the Pickett family had taken in, died in a fiery shootout with allies of her irresponsible, litigious mother. Or did she? Suddenly Sheridan Pickett is getting text messages from someone who claims she’s April, full of family details only April could know. Initially as skeptical as his daughter, Joe becomes convinced that April is alive but in grave danger once more. He’d been even more frantic if he knew that after a long string of dead-end foster homes, the 14-year-old had been rescued from a Chicago brothel by David “Stenko” Stenson, a gangster determined to show some kindness before cancer killed him, and Stenko’s son Robert, a rabid environmental activist obsessed with forcing citizen polluters to buy carbon offsets, often at gunpoint. Box spices Joe’s pursuit of the fast-moving Stensons and their unwilling companion with Joe’s obligatory tangles with the governor’s office, the FBI and his much-married mother-in-law. Basically, though, the tale is a tug-of-war between two father-figures over a young woman who isn’t the daughter of either one.
Though one of Box’s plot twists pays off in spades, most of them don’t, and the latest round of Joe’s unending domestic troubles reads like soap opera. Despite incidental pleasures, this is the weakest of Joe’s nine cases to date.Pub Date: June 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-399-15575-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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