The most conventional of Ellis’s three cases, but still heartfelt and often piercing in its portrayal of life on the edge...
A third walk on the wild side for Ellis Portal (The Feast of Stephen, 1999, etc.), former judge and former street person, whose police contact, Sgt. Matt West, wants his help mopping up the fallout from the murder of director Charington Simm during the Toronto Film Festival. Simm’s shooting must have been a cunning piece of work, since none of the hundreds of witnesses who saw his car pull up in front of a premiere noticed anything suspicious until Carrie, his daughter and star, saw his body fall to the ground. It’s not the murder he wants Ellis’s help with, Matt insists; it’s Carrie’s disappearance, presumably back into the jungle of street friends and shelters she knew only too well from her days as a runaway. At first Ellis resists. Humbled as he’s been, he has no great desire to return to the streets. But when a meeting that his manipulative old rival John Stoughton-Melville has set up with Ellis’s estranged son Jeffrey goes sour, and a greedy developer seizes his rooming house from under him and his landlady, former girl-gang member Tootie Beets, Ellis, seeing no better options, resigns himself to search for the vanished Carrie and Tootie—and the mysterious “Ferryman” to whom they’re both linked—through a series of nightmare landscapes from the Marble Widow, an uncompleted office building downtown, to his unlamented old stomping ground in the Don River Valley.
The most conventional of Ellis’s three cases, but still heartfelt and often piercing in its portrayal of life on the edge for all the once and future homeless.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-882593-44-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Locke’s advancement here is so bracing that you can’t wait to discover what happens next along her East Texas highway.
The redoubtable Locke follows up her Edgar-winning Bluebird, Bluebird (2017) with an even knottier tale of racism and deceit set in the same scruffy East Texas boondocks.
It’s the 2016 holiday season, and African American Texas Ranger Darren Mathews has plenty of reasons for disquiet besides the recent election results. Chiefly there’s the ongoing fallout from Darren’s double murder investigation involving the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. He and his wife are in counseling. He’s become a “desk jockey” in the Rangers’ Houston office while fending off suspicions from a district attorney who thinks Darren hasn’t been totally upfront with him about a Brotherhood member’s death. (He hasn’t.) And his not-so-loving mother is holding on to evidence that could either save or crucify him with the district attorney. So maybe it’s kind of a relief for Darren to head for the once-thriving coastal town of Jefferson, where the 9-year-old son of another Brotherhood member serving hard time for murdering a black man has gone missing while motorboating on a nearby lake. Then again, there isn’t that much relief given the presence of short-fused white supremacists living not far from descendants of the town’s original black and Native American settlers—one of whom, an elderly black man, is a suspect in the possible murder of the still-missing boy. Meanwhile, Darren’s cultivating his own suspicions of chicanery involving the boy’s wealthy and imperious grandmother, whose own family history is entwined with the town’s antebellum past and who isn’t so fazed with her grandson’s disappearance that she can’t have a lavish dinner party at her mansion. In addition to her gifts for tight pacing and intense lyricism, Locke shows with this installment of her Highway 59 series a facility for unraveling the tangled strands of the Southwest’s cultural legacy and weaving them back together with the volatile racial politics and traumatic economic stresses of the present day. With her confident narrative hands on the wheel, this novel manages to evoke a portrait of Trump-era America—which, as someone observes of a pivotal character in the story, resembles “a toy ball tottering on a wire fence” that “could fall either way.”
Locke’s advancement here is so bracing that you can’t wait to discover what happens next along her East Texas highway.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-36340-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
PROFILES
As for Columbus, it comes across much like other Midwestern cities in noir stories, which may be the point.
The latest stage in Akashic’s master plan to paint the world black is marked by 14 new stories whose most appealing features are their come-hither titles and the different shades of noir they invoke, from light gray to pitch black.
The hallmark here is competent but unspectacular professionalism that ticks all the boxes but originality. Sex fuels the plots of Robin Yocum’s “The Satin Fox,” in which a vice cop’s romance with a junkie stripper is threatened by blackmail; Kristen Lepionka’s “Gun People,” in which a wife takes up with one of the contractors upgrading the place her accountant husband has purchased; Craig McDonald’s “Curb Appeal,” which follows a woodworker’s romance with an interior decorator to its all-too-logical end; Mercedes King’s “An Agreeable Wife for a Suitable Husband,” whose ill-assorted title couple plot to rid themselves of each other; Julia Keller’s “All That Burns the Mind,” in which an Ohio State University English teacher finds a sadly predictable way of dealing with two problem students; and Khalid Moalim’s “Long Ears,” whose heroine learns a great deal about an ancient accident and a present-day murder but keeps mum. None of the entries excels editor Welsh-Huggins’ “Going Places,” in which a rising politician’s wife and fixer collude to shelter him from the consequences of his peccadilloes; the nearest competitors are Chris Bournea’s “My Name Is Not Susan” (a retired football player’s lover is suspected when he and his wife, the lover’s friend, are murdered), Tom Barlow’s “Honor Guard” (a chronically disappointing son negotiates frantically to keep his father out of prison after an argument with a stranger turns deadly), and Daniel Best’s “Take the Wheel” (a tawdry, fast-moving tale of a pair of frenemies whose partnership in a coffee shop is threatened by some lethally laced heroin). The newly arrived Chinese student in Nancy Zefris’ darkly comic “Foreign Study” manages to stumble through town without occasioning a single felony, and Laura Bickle’s “The Dead and the Quiet,” Lee Martin’s “The Luckiest Man Alive,” and Yolanda Tonette Sanders’ “The Valley” are notable for their closing intimations of grace, that rarest of qualities in noir.
As for Columbus, it comes across much like other Midwestern cities in noir stories, which may be the point.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61775-765-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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