Mixing romance and revenge, Cherry blends a potent, readable cocktail likely to appeal to fans of classic noir.
In this noirish, sleek debut, a homicide cop finds his life complicated by a sexy stranger in search of revenge.
When Detective Vince Bonelli falls for something—or someone—he falls hard. Celibate for 20 years after his first breakup, the philosopher/warrior (who had ambitions of being a priest) runs into trouble in line at the bakery one day: Gina Gallo, a sultry, mysterious chain smoker, jumps into his bed and his life. He is instantaneously smitten, though—ever the cop—he has to wonder: What would a knockout be doing with a potbellied mug like him? Gina, the archetypal femme fatale, plays it aloof—she destroys Vince at chess and then stays up at night, staring forlornly out the window, naked, smoking cigarettes. As it turns out, Gina is really Regan—the daughter of an informant who fell victim to the crime boss Vince is chasing. When she takes a shot at the gangster responsible for her mother’s death and Vince gets in the way, the doomed lovers are torn apart. Author Cherry (Christmas Cracker, 2012) jumps forward 10 years to find Vince has become a basketball-playing priest who drinks too much and can’t shake the memory of lost love. This is, in many ways, the most surprising and best section. In one wrenching scene, Vince wakes up after a bender (and near sexual indiscretion) to discover that he slept through a parishioner’s call for last rites. At the hospital, a nurse glances at him, “the smell of stale wine floating around him like an ungodly aura, and gave a disapproving frown”; the reader feels Vince’s embarrassment acutely. When Gina/Regan inevitably comes knocking, as well as the gangsters still looking for revenge, Vince tries to shake off the booze, and the novel hurtles toward its climax. By emphasizing Vince’s inner conflict and flaws, underwriting the sex and violence, and keeping the tone light, Cherry displays a talent for turning what may be a clichéd plot into character-driven fun. The stakes are low, but the author finds a healthy balance between the inner conflicts of the characters and their outer actions, fulfilling our expectations of the genre.
Mixing romance and revenge, Cherry blends a potent, readable cocktail likely to appeal to fans of classic noir.Pub Date: July 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-1489562227
Page Count: 390
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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