An intriguing but uneven crime tale.
In this novel, some young criminals look to shake down a vulnerable target for his considerable wealth, a conspiracy that results in more than they bargained for.
Trevor isn’t really the leader of his tribe of young gangsters, but the members call themselves “Trevor’s Crew” nonetheless. Cassie is the computer genius with a nebulous but terribly important database at her disposal. Fat Boy Charlie is a logistical whiz, and Handsome George is precisely that—and elegant and charming as well. They are under the supervision of the Old Man, an avuncular veteran of underworld life. The crew manages a regular poker game for true high rollers, featuring an astonishingly large buy-in ($1 million) and all the drugs, booze, and women the 16 players can handle. To make this an even more lucrative affair, they invite Shelby Coleman, a “gawky and college-boy fresh” kid with a considerable trust fund and a bad gambling habit, the “ripest peach that ever came their way.” His billionaire father is dead, and the only thing that stands between him and that colossal inheritance is the stepmother he loathes. She was formerly a manicurist and his father’s mistress. Trevor and his associates aim to force Shelby deep into debt and then leverage his position to bilk his stepmother of her largesse. In this ambitious novel, Green weaves a complex plot with admirable skill—the intricacy of the story never devolves into convolution. But the work sometimes feels familiar and dated, like an homage to a hard-boiled crime drama of another era. While the author displays an impressive penchant for plot construction and vivid prose—the crew’s poker game is a “Disneyland for the hedonistic”—many of the characters are recognizable types from a variety of novels, TV series, and films.
An intriguing but uneven crime tale.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 979-8414541950
Page Count: 289
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.
The loss of her police officer father and the discovery of an abandoned car in a local lake raise chilling questions regarding a young woman’s family history.
When Hazel Sharp returns to her hometown of Mirror Lake, North Carolina, for her father’s memorial, she and the other townspeople are confronted by a challenging double whammy: As they’re grieving the loss of beloved longtime police officer Detective Perry Holt, a disturbing sight appears in the lake, whose waterline is receding because of an ongoing drought—an old, unidentifiable car, which has likely been lurking there for years. Hazel temporarily leaves her Charlotte-based building-renovation business in the capable hands of her partners and reconnects with her brothers, Caden and Gage; her Uncle Roy; her old fling and neighbor, Nico; and her schoolfriend, Jamie, now a mother and married to Caden. Tiny, relentless suspicions rise to the metaphorical surface along with that waterlogged vehicle: There have been a slew of minor break-ins; two people go missing; and then, a second abandoned car is discovered. The novel digs deeper into Hazel’s family history—her father was a widow when he married Hazel’s mother, who later left the family, absconding with money and jewels—and Miranda, a consummate professional when it comes to exposing the small community tensions that naturally arise when people live in close proximity for generations, exposes revelation after twisty revelation: “Everything mattered disproportionately in a small town. Your success, but also your failure. Everyone knows might as well have been our town motto.”
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781668010440
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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