Burroughs meets Hammett in this gritty, at times tragic, noir.
Gran’s third novel, as original and compelling as her first two (Saturn’s Return to New York, 2001, etc.), is of an ex-junkie grifter, now hired to find a missing college girl in 1950 Manhattan.
Josephine Flannigan is lucky to have made it to her 30s. Raised rough in Hell’s Kitchen, she never expected much from life. She has scraped by, pulling small cons, shoplifting, whoring when times were particularly bad—just about anything to get enough for her next fix. Clean for the past two years, Joe cashes in the occasional ring from Tiffany to pay for her furnished room and lunch at the automat. Now a $2,000 proposition comes along—a wealthy Westchester couple is looking for their daughter, a former Barnard student, now a junkie—and who better than Joe to search every shooting gallery and dance hall likely to house a pretty young girl. They give Joe a picture of their Nadine standing with a mystery man (who turns out to be Jerry McFall, a dealer and pimp), and Joe is on the case, an unlikely though effective gumshoe. Joe begins to gather leads, touring New York’s sleaziest spots, reconnecting with old friends, lifelong junkies and hustlers. She also bumps into her kid sister, Shelley, now a rising TV star. Shelley’s cleaned herself up and put the past behind her, including Joe, who admits she did a lousy job as surrogate mother, putting too much junk into her arm and not enough food on Shelley’s dinner plate. Her leads pay off, but no sooner does Joe find McFall than he’s murdered, and the cops haul Joe in as their #1 suspect, and for good reason. Joe’s been framed, the victim of a dangerous con (the Westchester couple were actors) to find McFall, and now Joe needs to uncover who set her up before the police book her for murder. A gripping mystery, but Gran’s real success is in recreating 1950s New York—the petty cons, the taxi dancers, the dank hotel rooms—a mosaic of everything sad and ugly about addiction.
Burroughs meets Hammett in this gritty, at times tragic, noir.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-399-15345-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
