An engaging hard-boiled adventure with a memorable protagonist.
Conary (Still a Bitch, 2015, etc.) introduces private investigator Rachel Cord in this hard-boiled detective novel.
Gulf War veteran Cord is a no-nonsense private investigator in the heartland, scraping by on missing persons cases and trying to save up for breast-reduction surgery. “My breasts are huge,” she explains with characteristic bluntness, but “they don’t get me the respect I feel I deserve.” She’s called in to investigate a rash of assaults near a local cross-dressing cabaret. A gang of burly men in tracksuits have been attacking its performers; the most recent victim is in a coma. Cord takes the case, even though she’s still involved in the search for a runaway: a 14-year-old girl with the body of a grown woman who reminds Cord of her younger self. “I think she’s ripe for exploitation,” fears the P.I. The girl’s father molested her in the past, and Cord thinks she may fall prey to the predatory elements of the city. As Cord tries to get a handle on both mysteries, she finds herself embroiled in all manner of crime and mayhem, dredging up past traumas and calling into question her own morality and sexuality. Conary writes Cord with a wonderfully aggressive brusqueness that fills every scene, even as it hints at a deep vulnerability. The slogan on her business card, from which the novel takes its name, is only a taste of her P.I. bravado. The novel rushes along at a pace that barely leaves any time to take in the noirish scenery, hopping from twist to twist with verve and alacrity. Most enjoyably, a cast of LGBT characters—including the concupiscent Cord—offers a welcome inversion of typical genre tropes. It places investigators, victims, and victimizers on a level playing field, explores their complexities, and reveals their humanity. While Conary is hardy reinventing the genre, she does manage to breathe some life into it, and Cord and her quarry are compelling enough to keep readers following along until the end.
An engaging hard-boiled adventure with a memorable protagonist.Pub Date: March 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-40751-6
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Equal Footing Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
An improvement over The Dead Zone, with King returning to his most tried-and-true blueprint. As in The Shining, the psi-carrier is a child, an eight-year-old girl named Charlie; but instead of foresight or hindsight, Charlie has firestarting powers. She looks and a thing pops into flame—a teddy bear, a nasty man's shoes, or (by novel's end) steel walls, whole houses, and stables and crowds of government villains. Charlie's parents Vicky and Andy were once college guinea pigs for drug experiments by The Shop, a part of the supersecret Department of Scientific Intelligence, and were given a hyperpowerful hallucinogen which affected their chromosomes and left each with strange powers of mental transference and telekinesis. When Vicky and Andy married, their genes produced Charlie and her wild talent for pyrokinesis: even as a baby in her crib, Charlie would start fires when upset and, later on, once set her mother's hands on fire. So Andy is trying to teach Charlie how to keep her volatile emotions in check. But when one day he comes home to find Vicky gruesomely dead in the ironing-board-closet, murdered by The Shop (all the experimental guinea pigs are being eliminated), Andy goes into hiding with Charlie in Manhattan and the Vermont backwoods—and Charlie uses her powers to set the bad men on fire and blow up their cars. They're soon captured, however, by Rainbird, a one-eyed giant Indian with a melted face—and father and daughter, separated, spend months being tested in The Shop. Then Andy engineers their escape, but when Andy is shot by Rainbird, Charlie turns loose her atomic eyes on the big compound. . . . Dumb, very, and still a far cry from the excitement of The Shining or Salem's Lot—but King keeps the story moving with his lively fire-gimmick and fewer pages of cotton padding than in his recent, sluggish efforts. The built-in readership will not be disappointed.
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1980
ISBN: 0451167805
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
