Lemaitre (Three Days and a Life, 2017, etc.) takes his sardonic skills to new heights with this dark, loopy thriller, which...
Stuck in crummy jobs four years after having been laid off as an HR manager at a costume jewelry store, Alain Delambre will do anything to improve his lot—including shamelessly exploiting his wife and grown daughters.
Thoughts of his dire job situation "put me in the mood for terrorism," says the increasingly unhinged 57-year-old Parisian, who bids adieu to his latest menial gig by head-butting his boss. His hopes are lifted when BLC, a global consulting firm to which he has applied for the position of HR assistant, names him a candidate. Delambre is so desperate that he's willing to take part in BLC's "role play exercise," in which Arab actors playing armed commandos seize top executives of the oil company Exxyal, a BLC client, for the purpose of assessing their behavior under "violent and sustained stress." Everything that could go wrong does, especially after Delambre, who learns he is only a token candidate for the HR job, starts shooting off a Beretta he's bought for the occasion. In prison, portraying himself as a victim of the systemic mistreatment of unemployed seniors, he writes a splashy newspaper article that leads to a book deal. The book's title, I Just Wanted a Job, perfectly captures Lemaitre's ability to find hilarity in the most despicable of characters.
Lemaitre (Three Days and a Life, 2017, etc.) takes his sardonic skills to new heights with this dark, loopy thriller, which portrays the modern workplace as the last place a displaced soul would ever want to be.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63506-081-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: MacLehose Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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