Hip, slick, and surprisingly deft: a strangely uplifting tale of perfectly dreadful people.
A Dublin novelist/film editor debuts here with a taut, richly understated crime thriller, the first in a series, about a bad man trapped in his own dark world.
Harry Fielding is one of those useful bastards you don’t want to get too close to. An “understrapper” (i.e., gofer) at Britain’s MI5, Harry is so shady even his own boss doesn’t like to take phone calls from him. But when there’s a nasty bit of work to be attended to—be it blackmail, eavesdropping, money-laundering, or simple violence—Harry’s your man. Given his line of work, it’s understandable that Harry hasn’t an abundance of friends. He lives alone and subsists mainly on airline meals that he buys in bulk. Nonetheless, he manages to become friendly with Lisa Talbot, his next-door neighbor, whom Harry witnessing murdering her brother-in-law one night. As a kindred spirit, Harry declines to turn her in, but Lisa is caught all the same and packed off to jail. Later, Harry is sent to take photographs of a cabinet minister in flagrante delicto with his young mistress. Unfortunately, he ends up taking snaps of a murder instead—since the cabinet minister goes rather overboard this time and stabs the girl to death. All in a day’s work, of course: Harry checks in with the office and is told to help the man hush the business up. So the cabinet minister gets hustled back home and the poor girl’s body is dealt with as discreetly as Harry can manage. He doesn’t let on about the photos, however—yet. Eventually Harry meets and falls in love (or at least goes to bed) with Maureen Talbot, Lisa’s sister. Lisa had killed Maureen’s husband because he’d been beating Maureen mercilessly; now Maureen feels terrible that Lisa is languishing behind bars on her account. If only there were some way to help—which is to say, if only Harry had a heart. Perhaps his training as a blackmailer will come in useful after all—unless the cabinet minister is smarter than Harry. It’s a close call.
Hip, slick, and surprisingly deft: a strangely uplifting tale of perfectly dreadful people.Pub Date: June 25, 2002
ISBN: 0-14-200208-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
As in summer movies, a triple dose of violence conceals the absence of real menace when neither victims nor avengers stir...
Dr. Alex Cross has left Metro DC Homicide for the FBI, but it’s business as usual in this laughably rough-hewn fairy tale of modern-day white slavery.
According to reliable sources, more people are being sold into slavery than ever before, and it all seems to be going down on the FBI’s watch. Atlanta ex-reporter Elizabeth Connolly, who looks just like Claudia Schiffer, is the ninth target over the past two years to be abducted by a husband-and-wife pair who travel the country at the behest of the nefarious Pasha Sorokin, the Wolf of the Red Mafiya. The only clues are those deliberately left behind by the kidnappers, who snatch fashion designer Audrey Meek from the King of Prussia Mall in full view of her children, or patrons like Audrey’s purchaser, who ends up releasing her and killing himself. Who you gonna call? Alex Cross, of course. Even though he still hasn’t finished the Agency’s training course, all the higher-ups he runs into, from hardcases who trust him to lickspittles seething with envy, have obviously read his dossier (Four Blind Mice, 2002, etc.), and they know the new guy is “close to psychic,” a “one-man flying squad” who’s already a legend, “like Clarice Starling in the movies.” It’s lucky that Cross’s reputation precedes him, because his fond creator doesn’t give him much to do here but chase suspects identified by obliging tipsters and worry about his family (Alex Jr.’s mother, alarmed at Cross’s dangerous job, is suing for custody) while the Wolf and his cronies—Sterling, Mr. Potter, the Art Director, Sphinx, and the Marvel—kidnap more dishy women (and the occasional gay man) and kill everybody who gets in their way, and quite a few poor souls who don’t.
As in summer movies, a triple dose of violence conceals the absence of real menace when neither victims nor avengers stir the slightest sympathy.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-60290-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
For once Deaver takes more effort to establish his hero’s bona fides than to give him a compelling and logical plot. The...
Veteran thrillmeister Deaver kicks off a new series about a man who collects rewards for a living.
Don’t call Colter Shaw a private eye, or a freelance investigator, or even a soldier of fortune, though his job includes elements of all three. The son of a cranky survivalist who died years ago amid suspicious circumstances, light-footed Shaw has returned close to his childhood home in the Bay Area in the hope of claiming the $10,000 Frank Mulliner is offering for the return of his daughter, Sophie, a college student who stormed out after the two of them fought over the FOR SALE sign outside his house and hasn’t been seen since. Shaw, who has the cool-headed but irritating habit of calculating the numerical odds on every possibility, thinks there’s a 60 percent chance that Sophie’s dead, “murdered by a serial killer, rapist or a gang wannabe.” Even though he accepts rewards only for rescues, not recoveries, he begins sorting through the scant evidence, quickly gets a hot lead about Sophie’s fate, and just as quickly realizes that Detective Dan Wiley, of the Joint Major Crimes Task Force, should have followed exactly the same clues days ago. (The rapidly shifting relations between Shaw and the law, in fact, are a particular high point here.) The day after Shaw’s search for Sophie comes to a violent end, he’s already, in the time-honored manner of Deaver’s bulldog heroes (The Burial Hour, 2017, etc.), on the trail of a second abduction, that of LGBT activist Henry Thompson. Readers who haven’t skipped the prologue will know that still a third kidnap victim, very pregnant Elizabeth Chabelle, will need to be rescued the following day. Thompson’s grief-stricken partner, Brian Byrd, tells Shaw, “It’s like this guy’s playing some goddamn sick game”—a remark Deaver’s fans will know to give just as much weight as Shaw himself does.
For once Deaver takes more effort to establish his hero’s bona fides than to give him a compelling and logical plot. The results are subpar for this initial installment but more encouraging for the promised series.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53594-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
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