Some dazzling verbal and atmospheric effects distinguish, but don—t entirely redeem, this highly pitched portrayal of a corrupt attorney’s descent into a maelstrom of his own making: the second novel from the author of The Raven (1995), which won a Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. The story begins on a high point: the discovery of the body of Isabel Santos, secretary and sometime lover to Nathan Stein, a lawyer whose derelict and incorrigibly criminal clients pay him with cocaine, protection, and entree to the more lucrative levels of New York City’s thriving drug trade. Evidence immediately points to Nathan as Isabel’s killer, but his intricate connections with powerful people (notably Stein pere, also a notoriously connected attorney) and the mixed feelings that torment NYPD detective Errol Santos, Nathan’s old law school classmate (and Isabel’s brother), leave Nathan free to wander the city’s mean midnight streets in a fog of guilty recollection. Landesman glides forward and backward in time, exploring the disturbed consciousness of Nathan, Errol, and also Claire Proffitt (!), an embittered paralegal who was once Stein’s mistress and fiancÇe (and the mother of his malformed baby) and is now Santos’s lover. Other coincidences and dark secrets abound in a feverish melodrama that features arresting imagery (storm clouds are “dark horses rearing up”; in a hospital morgue, “fermenting corpses stretched out like loaves in their individual ovens”) and emotionally overloaded scenes (Nathan’s belated visit to the dying mother of his other illegitimate child; a chilling Rikers Island interview with a murderous drug-dealer/godmother; a climactic fire at the Steins’ East Hampton mansion). It all frets and struts impressively, and Landesman comes through with a stunning explanation of his story’s central mystery, capping it with a terrifically bleak, sardonic denouement. Still, the novel feels willfully obscure, as well as over- indebted to obvious models (Chinatown, William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness). Bold, often enthralling stuff—but one guesses the gifted Landesman can do better.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-78181-9
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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