A pleasant read about a son investigating his father’s past that delivers a satisfying surprise revelation.
Bales (But Then My Voice Changes: From Fundamentalist to Nonbeliever, 2012) makes his first foray into fiction with a first-person narrative of one man’s search to solve a family mystery.
Meet Perk Parker: age 60, 15 months widowed, children grown and out of the house, and recently retired from the law faculty of a small Northern California college. Perk embarks on a mission to discover what happened to his father, who disappeared 50 years ago. In 1943, Lyle Parker was enticed by his longtime buddy Dwayne Breedlove to join him in his hunt for hidden Spanish gold. Off they went in Breedlove’s ’38 Chevy pickup truck, never to be seen again. Rumors circulated. The pickup was detected in a ravine a few weeks after they began their adventure; and two years after that, some kids found Breedlove’s body in an abandoned mine. Did Perk’s father kill him? Perk returns to Baca County, Colorado, determined to uncover the truth and, not incidentally, perhaps rekindle a friendship with his childhood sweetheart. As it turns out, it is fortunate that when he packed his 20-year-old Mustang for the journey, Perk decided to include his father’s old Winchester rifle and his brother Byron’s .32 revolver. There are scant clues to follow after half a century, but a dogged Perk tracks down every lead, taking readers on a picturesque tour of southeast Colorado, a bit of New Mexico, and a few incursions into Kansas. Perk details every step, and mile, of his adventure; each breakfast, lunch, and dinner; the exact attire of everyone he encounters; even the daily weather reports. If this meticulous attention to the ordinary occasionally becomes a bit tiresome, the literary device also works to create a well-defined character with all his idiosyncrasies. By the time Perk winds up in a life-or-death confrontation, readers should be right there with him. Bales’ prose is comfortably skillful. His linguistic focus is not on the clever twist of phrase but rather on the mechanics of carefully assembling the story blocks and maintaining momentum.
A pleasant read about a son investigating his father’s past that delivers a satisfying surprise revelation.Pub Date: March 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4582-1842-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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