A moody yarn that cannily merges punk-rock world weariness and real-world criminality.
A safecracker tries to avoid a gang of drug dealers long enough to make one last score.
Ricky Mendoza Jr., the hero of Gattis’ sixth book (All Involved, 2015, etc.), is a safecracker with the nickname Ghost, which evokes both his secrecy and his mordant sensibility. As the story opens, he’s determined to skim some money for “somebody who needs it” during a DEA raid of an LA stash house. This risks the ire of his federal employers but something even worse from the gangsters from Southern California and Mexico who spot him leaving the house with a suspicious bag. Rudolfo, the novel’s second narrator, is a gangster who’s watching Ricky but who has his own personal interests and relationship with the Drug Enforcement Administration to maintain. Between the two men, Gattis’ novel is full of streetwise observations about the drug trade, from secretive communication methods to avoid wiretaps (sign language) to the cartel’s cruel punishments for misbehavior (barrels, gasoline). But Ricky also has a tender side: he’s a cancer survivor and recovering addict who can’t shake the memory of his late girlfriend, Rose. (Throughout the novel he turns to a mix tape of old-school punk rock Rose made him.) Plus, the novel is set across three days in September 2008, just as the housing market is cratering, and Ricky is eager to provide some financial support to a few incipient Great Recession victims. The narrative back and forth between Ricky and Rudolfo is a bit out of balance—Ricky is clearly the better-drawn figure—and the prose gets soft whenever Ricky does. (“The world is going to be better off without any more of me in it, but it sure could have used a lot more of her.”) But the tension about Ricky’s fate remains steady to the novel’s somber, surprising conclusion, which justifies the neo-noirish mood he cultivates.
A moody yarn that cannily merges punk-rock world weariness and real-world criminality.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-25337-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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