An imperfect but highly readable mystery built around a man in a coma.
A priest tries to discover the reason for a firefighter’s suicide attempt in this novel.
After 11 years in the priesthood, Father Jamie Bluterre still hasn’t found his calling. Attached to New York’s Our Lady of Sorrows Parish, he considers this assignment his last opportunity to prove he deserves to wear his collar. He has been ordered by his superior to receive the confession of 55-year-old firefighter Sean “Duke” Ducotty, who lies comatose in a hospital with a bullet lodged in his brain from an attempted suicide. Doctors assume Duke is brain dead, but he can actually hear everything that goes on around him, trapped like a prisoner in his own body. He is also visited by visions of Valerie Dunn, his feisty former lover. Father Blu seeks to uncover the cause of Duke’s suicide attempt and, thereby, hopefully, to save the man’s soul. “I want to understand—the church wants to understand—if he was fully responsible or even responsible at all for his action,” he explains to Duke’s former battalion chief. “What was his state of mind when he did this?” Meanwhile, Duke relives the events that led to the fateful act, scouring them for meaning. The two haunted men, one sleeping, one awake, seek to unravel the mystery of Duke and Valerie, a series of arsons, and the musical clues that the firefighter lay scattered behind him. Lengsfelder’s prose is moody and dreamlike, particularly Duke’s comatose ruminations: “In those drugged hours, Val came, half woman half moth; great ochre wings challenging the emptiness, with the grace of a flame and the will of a raptor, dragging me back into the light, into the fluorescent hospital room with the bleached shapes, that once again became doctors circling me.” The novel unfolds slowly, and while the premise is wonderfully evocative, readers will quickly get the sense that the author is struggling to make Duke more compelling and mysterious than he actually is. There’s only so much romance that can be squeezed from the lives of these aging New Yorkers, many of whom seem to chafe under the noirish framing. Even so, the book is often compelling, and Father Blu is an oddly dynamic and vulnerable detective as he tries to salvage Duke’s soul—and his own.
An imperfect but highly readable mystery built around a man in a coma.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 417
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If you love good crime writing but aren’t familiar with Winslow’s work, read this trilogy in order.
The dramatic conclusion to the trilogy about two New England crime families begun in City on Fire (2022) and City of Dreams (2023).
Near the end of his journey, multimillionaire Danny Ryan watches a casino implode in a mushroom cloud of dust and muses about his life’s implosions: “The cancer that killed his wife, the depression that destroyed his love, the moral rot that took his soul.” Danny is from Providence, Rhode Island, and desperately tried to leave his criminal life behind him. But using a ton of ill-gotten gains, he invests heavily in Las Vegas properties. Congress is conducting an investigation into gambling that could destroy his casino business and even land him in jail. An FBI agent plans to take Danny down for major sins he’d like to repent for. Meanwhile, can he make peace with his enemies? Nope, doesn’t look like it. Even if the parties involved want to put the past behind them, the trouble is that they don’t trust each other. Is Vern Winegard setting Dan up? Is Dan setting Vern up? “Trust? Trust is children waiting for Santa Claus.” So what could have been a “Kumbaya,” nobody-wants-to-read-this story turns into a grisly bloodletting filled with language that would set Sister Mary Margaret’s wimple on fire—figuratively speaking, as she’s not in the book. But the Catholic reference is appropriate: Two of the many colorful characters of ill repute are known as the Altar Boys, serving “Last Communion” to their victims. On the law-abiding side and out of the line of fire is an ex-nun-turned-prosecutor nicknamed Attila the Nun, who’s determined to bring justice for a gory matricide. (Rhode Island really had such a person, by the way.) Finally, the prose is just fun: A friend warns Dan about Allie Licata: “In a world of sick fucks, even the sick fucks think Licata’s a sick fuck.” A couple of things to note: This not only ends the trilogy, but it also closes out the author’s career, as he has said he’ll write no more novels.
If you love good crime writing but aren’t familiar with Winslow’s work, read this trilogy in order.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780063079472
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PROFILES
A tale that’s hard to believe but easy to swallow in a single gulp.
A bear is hunting prey in Wyoming’s Bighorns. And not just any bear.
It’s bad enough that Clay Hutmacher, who manages the Double Diamond Ranch, has lost his son, Clay Jr., to a vicious attack by a grizzly bear. What’s much worse is that Clay Jr.—who’d been about to pop the question to game warden Joe Pickett’s daughter, Sheridan—is only the first of the victims over an exceptionally broad geographical area. Marshal Marvin Bertignolli is clawed and bitten to death over in Hanna. Sgt. Ryan Winner is found bleeding out north of Rawlins. Former Twelve Sleep County prosecutor Dulcie Schalk, one of two survivors of an ambush, doesn’t survive her final encounter. The four experts chosen to kill the grizzly rope Joe into their expedition, but since their quarry keeps turning up far from the last sighting, the most meaningful confrontation the Predator Attack Team has is with a pair of Mama Bears, animal rights activists who demand due process for Tisiphone, as they’ve dubbed the presumed killer. Box, who’s far too canny to leave Tisiphone alone on center stage, follows Joe’s old antagonist Dallas Cates as the ex–rodeo star is released from prison and embarks on his revenge tour, which takes him to Lee Ogburn-Russell, an inventor whose life Dallas saved, and Axel Soledad, a correspondent who shares so many enemies with Dallas that he suggests they go after them together. Franchise fans will appreciate new details about Joe’s complicated family, the obligatory high-country landscapes, and yet another corrupt law enforcer.
A tale that’s hard to believe but easy to swallow in a single gulp.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780593331347
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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