A hard-boiled crime drama that lacks well-defined characters or a comprehensible plot.
A luckless gambler goes on the run after refusing a mission from a loan shark in Downs’ (Penchant for Vengeance, 2017, etc.) novella.
In this brief noir pastiche, desperate, recovering alcoholic Johnny Chapman passes out during a card game from an unspecified condition. He regains consciousness after one of the other players finds pills in his pocket and shoves them in his mouth; Johnny had been prescribed them by a man in a white lab coat. However, he then loses the rest of his chips. He tries to drink away his sorrows and has a brief encounter with former girlfriend Gwendoline, who’s mixed up in vague troubles of her own. She watches Johnny get severely beaten in the bar, then later threatens to shoot him while rehashing the end of their past relationship. The next day, she gets fired from her job, punches her boss, and get knocked over by a teenager in the street. Meanwhile, a loan shark, whose money Johnny lost in the poker game, threatens to kill him if he doesn’t inject a racing dog with a hormone that will somehow make it lose a race. (They already tested the hormone on Johnny, while he was sleeping.) Johnny reluctantly agrees but ultimately can’t bring himself to do it. While on the lam, he robs a bank, gets robbed twice, and gets into a lot of fights with strangers. The story is full of confusing contradictions, incomprehensible motivations, and dropped plot threads; for example, after the opening scene, neither the headaches nor the pills are mentioned. The violence is miraculously consequence-free, and Johnny kills several people—including a convenience-store clerk—without remorse. It’s all set in a version of Albuquerque where everybody still uses Blackberrys and police are mostly absent. Downs also offers cartoonish dialogue (“If your trap opens again, I’ll hit you so hard your grandchildren will feel the blow”) and elaborately mixed metaphors (“Maybe it was some dream on some horizon that was just out of reach, pushing and pulling him, and bouncing him around like a red rubber ball on an open field”).
A hard-boiled crime drama that lacks well-defined characters or a comprehensible plot.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62694-817-4
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Black Opal Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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