Dugoni's well out in front until the last 50 pages or so when an unfortunate fusion of over-cooked plotting and overwrought...
In this debut thriller, bitter men chase the single sweet thing life has to offer them: revenge.
David Sloane, however, is not among the vengeful. Though a decorated ex-marine, he's on the mild-mannered side, an ordinary citizen, a hard-working lawyer—brilliant, successful, but lonely, too, more so than he's prepared to acknowledge even to himself. Practicing in San Francisco, he's had 14 noteworthy wins in a row, and no one who's seen him sway a jury predicts a snapped string in the foreseeable future. And yet someone out there doesn't like him. Or, to put a slightly different spin on it, someone has singled him out for negative attention. His apartment has been ransacked, but nothing is missing. Clearly, an error has been made, David tells himself at first—mistaken identity. Wrong. And soon enough, mysteriously, he comes into possession of something ruthless people will unhesitatingly kill for—a file. It contains a 30-year-old secret, so wicked, so blood-drenched and so explosive that the nation's corridors of power would be cluttered with trashed careers if it were to be revealed. It also contains information important to David for highly personal reasons. In search of dangerous truths, David begins a perilous journey. During it, he finds friends and allies, a woman to love and a whole series of implacable enemies.
Dugoni's well out in front until the last 50 pages or so when an unfortunate fusion of over-cooked plotting and overwrought prose results in a tumble. Still, a writer to watch.Pub Date: March 21, 2006
ISBN: 0-446-57869-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Backman plays the story for both cynicism and hope, and his skill makes both hard, but not impossible, to resist.
Shockwaves from the incidents in Beartown (2017) shake an economically depressed hockey town in this latest from the author of A Man Called Ove.
Swedish novelist Backman loves an aphorism and is very good at them; evident in all his novels is an apparent ability to state a truth about humanity with breathtaking elegance. Often, he uses this same elegance to slyly misdirect his readers. Sometimes he overreaches and words that sound pretty together don’t hold up to scrutiny. This novel has a plethora of all three. Grim in tone, it features an overstocked cast of characters, all of whom are struggling for self-definition. Each has previously been shaped by the local hockey club, but that club is now being defunded and resources reallocated to the club of a rival town. Some Beartown athletes follow, some don’t. Lines are drawn in the sand. Several characters get played by a Machiavellian local politician who gets the club reinstated. Nearly all make poor decisions, rolling the town closer and closer to tragedy. Backman wants readers to know that things are complicated. Sure, many of Beartown’s residents are bigots and bullies. But some are generous and selfless. Actually, the bigots and bullies are also generous and selfless, in certain circumstances. And Lord knows they’ve all had a rough time of it. The important thing to remember is that hockey is pure. Except when it inspires violence. This is an interesting tactic for a novel in our cultural moment of sensitivity, and it can feel cumbersome. “When guys are scared of the dark they’re scared of ghosts and monsters,” he writes. “But when girls are scared of the dark they’re scared of guys.” Margaret Atwood said it better and with more authority decades ago.
Backman plays the story for both cynicism and hope, and his skill makes both hard, but not impossible, to resist.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6079-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.
A German teenager whose family moves to Alabama gets a deep-fried Southern gothic education.
Max is gifted, but if you’re thinking “honors student,” think again. He touches dead animals or withered plants and they return to life; whether his power (or curse, as Max thinks of it) works on dead people is part of the story’s suspense. The curse comes with pitfalls: Migraines besiege him after his resurrections, and he craves gobs of sugar. This insightful novel isn’t a fantasy, and Hudson treats Max’s gift as quite real. In addition, Hudson, an Alabama native, memorably evokes her home state, both its beauty and its warped rituals. Max’s father is an engineer, and the car company where he works has transferred him to a factory in Alabama; Max’s parents hope living there will give him a clean break from his troubled love for his dead classmate, Nils. Max is drawn to Pan, a witchy gay boy who wears dresses and believes in auras and incantations. Pan is the only person who knows about Max’s power. But Max also becomes enchanted with the Judge, a classmate's powerful father who’s running for governor and is vociferous about his astringent faith in Christ after an earlier life of sin (it's hard to read the novel and not think of Judge Roy Moore, who ran for U.S. Senate from Alabama, as the Judge’s real-life analogue). The Judge has plans for Max, who feels torn between his love for outcast Pan and the feeling of belonging the Judge provides. But that belonging has clear costs; the Judge likes to test potential believers by dosing them with poison. The real believers survive. Hudson invokes the tropes of Alabama to powerful effect: the bizarre fundamentalism; the religion of football; the cultlike unification of church and state. The tropes run the risk of feeling hackneyed, but this is Southern gothic territory, after all. Hudson brings something new to that terrain: an overt depiction of queer desire, welcome because writers such as Capote’s and McCullers’ depictions of queerness were so occluded.
A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-629-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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