A brew of cartoonish outlaws has plenty of pulp but not much fizz.
Callow young gangsters run amok with their parents’ blessings in this boisterous multigenerational crime saga.
Cruising around in stolen convertibles blasting Ray Charles, inhaling fistfuls of cocaine and dispensing the same to their ladies, the 20-somethings in the $unset Boyz posse live large in a Kennedy-era Los Angeles that feels–and spellz–more like 1992 than 1962. Crime is a family tradition for them. Heath van Horn uses his movie-star looks to recruit high school girls for the chain of brothels he inherited from his madam mom. Mike Folger and Jack Battreall emulate their fathers, a legendary bank-robbing duo, by looting pay phones. Joey and Bobby Del Rio are moving up in the drug empire chieftained by their dad Lolly, who takes their buddy Martin Silver under his wing after he’s disowned by his perversely law-abiding parents. Theirs is a Runyonesque milieu of purplish trash-talk (“I rip out your throat, Mexican bastard!”) and poetic mayhem (“His face exploded, his teeth floating to the floor like snowflakes in a hard red rain”), pliant whores and sex-starved cougars, and cops whose breath is as brutal as their fists. But Martha Stewart and Anna Wintour are the presiding spirits of this demimonde; it’s a place where “the table lamps and floor lamps [are] unmistakably Louis Comfort Tiffany,” where “the plates and serving dishes [are] square earthenware, black, with a pattern of large purple iris,” where Lolly wears “a gray Nehru suit trimmed in dark gray brocade, with embroidered frog enclosures from the throat to the bottom of the jacket.” The vulgar energy of St. Clair’s prose is sapped by all the tasteful fashion and furnishings, and by the flatness of the plot. While busy and intricate, the heists, scams and orgies the boyz engineer lack drama; they usually go off without a hitch and end with the refrain “a good time was had by all.” The novel’s tone of vapid consumerism and wish-fulfillment make their capers seem like beer commercials.
A brew of cartoonish outlaws has plenty of pulp but not much fizz.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-1278-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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