Well-rounded characters make big footprints in the Minnesota slush.
Psychological thriller from Skinner, a big step up from his decent debut, Amnesia Nights (2004).
The grim Minneapolis weather matches the characters’ moods in the opening teaser, which shows Lewis Ingraham striking Stephen Grant, who slides down a hillside into the frozen Mississippi. Three quarters of the story pass before we get back to that scene. Meanwhile, we learn that Stephen, a brilliant, tenure-tracked professor in cultural studies, is the lover of Lewis’s daughter Jay, a 23-year-old single mother, waitress and genius who dropped out of college when pregnant in her sophomore year. But Stephen is not the father of four-year-old Ramona, who faces up to life’s questions, mysteries and ghosts with a clear mind, strongly captured by the author. Bearing down on this likable trio is Lewis, obsessively protective of his daughter and granddaughter. He’s been severely depressed since the death six months earlier of wife Anna, a victim of pancreatic cancer. The tale and suspense run thin, but the characters and dialogue compel full attention. What plot there is concerns Stephen’s love for Jay and the workings of Lewis’s disordered mind. During his 25-year marriage he committed adultery a few times and took out his guilt on his wife. Now that Anna’s gone, he turns his full, disapproving attention to his daughter’s romance with Stephen, nine years her senior. When Lewis sneaks into one of Stephen’s classes, sits in the back row and finds that he can’t bear the charismatic lecturer’s marvels of thought, the narrative finally arrives at the opening moment of physical violence. This high point is matched by a scene in the astral plane, where Anna’s ghost and Minnesota’s Bob Dylan show up to talk things over with Stephen—the mirthlessly amusing Dylan being rendered with pricelessly apt inflections.
Well-rounded characters make big footprints in the Minnesota slush.Pub Date: July 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-46543-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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