A man with no memory stumbles into his own shaggy dog story.
The narrator of Young’s (Double Cover, 2011, etc.) intricately plotted, frequently hilarious new novel wakes up in a rural cabin with no memory of how he got there or who he is. He shares the cabin with a feisty little dog and a well-dressed man lying dead on the floor with an arrow through his heart—only he’s not really dead; he’s got enough life left in him to whisper to the main character that “the answer lies with Keats.” When our narrator asks “Keats who?” the man heaves one last word, “Cretin,” before dying, leaving our hero to reflect, “He was really dead this time. Really dead and kind of rude.” Before the amnesiac main character can figure out what to do with the body, he gets another visitor—the mystery man Enescu Fleet, an accomplished amateur sleuth and reputed inventor of the phrase “cool beans.” After a little verbal sparring, the main character decides to reveal the dead body to Fleet and seek his counsel—but by that point the dead body is long gone, leaving not even a blood stain. The novel that unfolds from such a feverish, smile-inducing setup repays the promise of its opening many times over. The setting is revealed not only as an Indian casino in Maine but also as the venue of Deadly Allusions, a televised game show in which realistic murders are staged in order to give amateur sleuths a chance to test their deductive abilities. The story’s odd heroes are quickly enmeshed in just such a simulated murder, which quickly complicates with corrupt politicians, shady deals and, of course, actual murder. Young’s narrative dexterity never flags, although occasionally his cleverness gets the better of him (there are many points in the book where the only thing the main character seems to have forgotten is his name—a very convenient kind of amnesia). This novel has more barbs than a Dorothy Parker short story and is every bit as enjoyable. An utterly winning, deceptively smart collection of mishaps, plot twists and grinning one-liners.
Pub Date: July 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463602017
Page Count: 227
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
