Truly clever writing about a clever writer turned true detective.
Hip, crisp dialogue and swift prose rife with apt, unflashy literary allusions; a credibly brilliant and likable heroine; an effectively chilling behind-bars mise en scène; and a firecracker plot all add up to a very cool, smart thriller.
Bartender by night, cute Brooklynite Ivy Seidel pens fiction and is all hot to publish in the New Yorker. While waiting out unlikely fame, she agrees to teach composition in a literal school of hard knocks: Dannemora Prison. Abrahams (Oblivion, 2005) assembles a convincingly menacing student body: Latino gangsters, rip-off artists making the wicked most out of Harvard MBAs and straight-ahead, ice-cold killers. Between classes, she’s futzing with a fairly iffy story called “Caveman” and hanging with either bohemians or suits, all the while reluctantly discovering that the macho men inside the pokey seem much more exciting. They fill her on some primal level with both fear and fascination. Especially Vance Harrow. Serving significant time for his role in a long-ago heist-slash-murder in a casino, he intrigues Ivy not only with his stoic mystery, but, of all things, the way he fulfills his class assignments—with lean, vivid images that read like a better Charles Bukowski. Convincing herself that so good a writer can’t be a truly bad egg, she begins amateur sleuthing, revisiting the slot-machine scene of the crime, chatting up former eyewitnesses, exhuming the teacher’s pet’s conspirators from strip clubs and other suitably demimonde haunts. But Harrow again will surprise her. Studded with alarmingly precise renderings of explosive violence and pop-culture references ranging from Adam Sandler flicks to the Harvard Crimson to Wal-Mart nametags, the story reads like up-to-the-minute Ross MacDonald, Abraham’s idol and the presiding eminence of brainy crime fare.
Truly clever writing about a clever writer turned true detective.Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-072665-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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
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
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