A motley assortment of bad guys will have readers struggling to remember the good guys, but in the end, the persistently...
In Saltzman’s debut procedural thriller, two Brooklyn patrolmen are upgraded to plainclothes officers to work a variety of cases and declare war against crime.
A routine traffic stop turns cops Bobby Salter and Vinny Serpintino into media darlings when they arrest two notorious drug suppliers and recover close to $2.5 million in laundered money. Their transfer to the plainclothes squad to stop a string of armed robberies increases the amount of lawbreaking they come across in New York. Before long, they’re facing murdered gang members, a rapist/murderer, gunrunners and a possible assassination. Saltzman’s novel is just as much about the criminals as it is the cops, if not more so. Most officers in Bobby and Vinny’s squad are provided an engaging back story—e.g., Angel, the sole female, who’s openly gay—but so are the members of the gang BoB (Band of Brothers), most notably the leader, Cha Cha. Not that the cops are nondescript, but they sometimes feel interchangeable: Officers move to other precincts, they retire or are killed, and Bobby is the only constant, having a significant role in all the cases. The shifting of characters or job locales allows for fresh settings, as well as an impressive range of crimes to tackle, but it also brightens the spotlight on the ever-present Bobby while most of his fellow law enforcers fade into the background. Meanwhile, the impressive depiction of the criminals is more distinctive: It’s difficult not to sympathize with Cha Cha, who deals in drugs, prostitution and murder, as he helplessly watches his soldiers being systematically eliminated; the rapist/murderer has an unsettling but unquestionably riveting perspective; and while Bobby and Vinny are rarely called by their titular nicknames, the villains sport garish but amusing sobriquets—e.g., D’Cool, Skunk and Caveman. Bobby, however, holds his own; even when two cadets are sent undercover to infiltrate a gang selling guns, they’re always sure to check in with Bobby, the cop who’s clearly spearheading the investigation.
A motley assortment of bad guys will have readers struggling to remember the good guys, but in the end, the persistently solid hero prevails.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1483906584
Page Count: 312
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Lacking in both thrills and chills.
Another homage to classic horror from a bestselling author.
Sager’s debut novel, Final Girls (2017), wasn’t so much a horror novel as a commentary about horror movies in novel form. It was clever but also very well-crafted. The author tried to do something similar with The Last Time I Lied (2018), with significantly less satisfying results. This new novel is another attempt to make the model work. Whether or not it does depends on how invested one is in formula for the sake of formula. Jules Larsen is getting over a breakup and the loss of her job when she finds a gig that seems too good to be true: The Bartholomew, a storied Manhattan building, wants to pay her thousands of dollars to simply occupy a vacant—and luxurious—apartment. Jules soon gets the feeling that all is not as it seems at the Bartholomew, which is, of course, a perfect setup for some psychological suspense, but the problem is that there is little in the way of narrative tension because Jules’ situation is so obviously not right from the very beginning. While interviewing for the job, she's asked about her health history. She's informed that she is not allowed to have guests in the apartment. She's warned that she must not interact with or talk to anyone else about the building’s wealthy and famous inhabitants. And she learns that she will be paid under the table. While this might not be enough to deter someone who is broke and desperate, it does mean that Jules should be a bit more concerned than she is when the really scary stuff starts happening. It’s possible to read this as a parody of the absurdly intrepid horror heroine, but, even as that, it’s not a particularly entertaining parody. Jules’ best friend makes a reference to American Horror Story, which feels less like a postmodern nod than a reminder that there are other, better examples of the genre that one could be enjoying instead.
Lacking in both thrills and chills.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4514-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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