Rowson strikes a nice balance between thriller and puzzler in the third in the series.
The death of a businessman triggers a probe into the long-ago disappearance of a salvage ship.
Though he’s tough as only a marine commando can be, Art Marvik has a soft spot for Helen Shannon, a jill-of-all-trades he met when investigating her sister’s death (Silent Running, 2015). Now Helen’s restoring boats for Ian Bradshaw at Aquamarine Cleaning. Spooked by a conversation she overhears at the docks claiming “the target’s been taken out,” she calls her old pal. A worried Marvik accompanies Helen home and discovers Bradshaw’s body in her bedsit. The police put the crime down to fellow lodger Gavin Yardly, whose body is found at the bottom of a cliff, an apparent suicide. But Detective Chief Superintendent Crowder of the National Intelligence Marine Squad thinks there’s more to the story because he’d recently received a message from Yardly about the Mary Jo, a salvage tug that disappeared in 2003 on the way to Newfoundland to pull the S.S. Celeste back to port to be dismantled. Four crewmen were aboard the Mary Jo, and if the ship could be located, Crowder might discover their fates. Rowson launches Marvik and his pal Strathen (Dangerous Cargo, 2016, etc.) onto stormy seas, forcing them to navigate between ruthless killers who want to cover their tracks and equally unprincipled business owners who want to protect their assets, all the while keeping the increasingly restless Helen safe from danger.
Rowson strikes a nice balance between thriller and puzzler in the third in the series.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8732-0
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
You'll kill this one fast and be glad you did.
When a corporate lawyer who divorced his first wife and married her more successful sister is found dead in his home in the Hamptons, his teenage son goes on trial for murder.
The fans who put Burke's (The Wife, 2018, etc.) last domestic thriller on the bestseller list are going to be happy with this one, a gimmick-free murder mystery with a two-stage surprise ending and uncommonly few credibility-straining plot elements. No double narrator! No unreliable narrator! No handsome psychopaths from central casting! And though there's usually at least one character in this type of book who isn't quite three-dimensional, most of the players here feel like they could have worked in a domestic novel without a murder, which is a kind of test for believability and page-worthiness. The star of the show is Chloe Taylor, a woman's magazine editor-in-chief who has become a hero of the #MeToo movement and a target of misogynist haters on social media. The lumpy area beneath the surface of her smooth, pretty life is the fact that she married her boozy, unstable, maternally incompetent sister's ex-husband and has been raising her nephew, Ethan, as her own son. When his father turns up dead, Ethan tells so many lies about his doings on the evening in question that despite the fact that he's obviously not a murderer, he ends up the No. 1 suspect. As soon as he's arrested, his real mom, Nicky, swoops into town and the sisters form an uneasy and shifting alliance. You'll think you have this thing all figured out, but a series of reveals at the eleventh hour upend those theories. Most of the important people in this novel are women—the head cop, the defense attorney, the judge—and their competent performances create a solid underpinning for the plot.
You'll kill this one fast and be glad you did.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-285337-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by...
Almost as frustrating as it is commanding, McCarthy’s ninth (and first since the completion of his Border Trilogy: Cities of the Plain, 1998, etc.) is a formidable display of stunningly written scenes that don’t quite cohere into a fully satisfying narrative.
It’s a bleak chronicle of murder, revenge and implacable fate pocked with numerous echoes of McCarthy’s great Blood Meridian (1985). Here, the story’s set in 1980 in southern Texas near the Mexican border, where aging Sheriff Bell, a decorated WWII veteran, broods heroically over the territory he’s sworn to protect, while—in a superb, sorrowful monologue—acknowledging the omnipresence of ineradicable evil all around him. Then the focus trains itself on Vietnam vet Llewellyn Moss, a hunter who stumbles upon several dead bodies, a stash of Mexican heroin and more than $2 million in cash that he absconds with. The tale then leaps among the hunted (Moss), an escaped killer (Anton Chigurh), whose crimes include double-crossing the drug cartel from which the money was taken, the Army Special Forces freelancer (Carson Wells) hired by druglords and—in dogged pursuit of all the horrors spawned by their several interactions—the intrepid, however flawed and guilty, stoical Sheriff Bell: perhaps the most fully human and sympathetic character McCarthy has ever created. The justly praised near-biblical style, an artful fusion of brisk declarative sentences and vivid, simple images, confers horrific intensity on the escalating violence and chaos, while precisely dramatizing the sense of nemesis that pursues and punishes McCarthy’s characters (scorpions in a sealed bottle). But this eloquent melodrama is seriously weakened by its insufficiently varied reiterated message: “if you were Satan . . . tryin to bring the human race to its knees, what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by William Faulkner.Pub Date: July 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40677-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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