It’s less a whodunit than a ripsnorter, with an emphasis on the ripping. Or maybe the snorting.
Thomas Fool, Satan’s top crime solver, is back, and, more than ever, you wonder what awful deeds this poor wretch did in life to deserve such a relentlessly dreadful calling.
This follow-up to Unsworth’s debut novel, The Devil’s Detective (2015), finds Hell’s “Information Man” once again dealing with wanton, inexplicable, and unauthorized violence visited upon the Eternally Condemned. In this case, it’s a series of fires—“Six, maybe seven, or even eight”—that have fatally burned living souls all over the netherworld. (And yes, Hell is notorious for fire. But if you paid attention to this novel’s immediate predecessor, you’re aware that these days, there are many more awful things that can happen to you Down There than being roasted on a spit 24/7.) As Fool is struggling to determine a pattern for this homicidal arson, his masters dispatch him and a delegation of demons to Heaven, aka the Not-Nearly-As-Bad-Place-Up-Yonder, where, hard as it may be to believe, there are also a handful of unexplained murders that may or may not be linked to the ones down below. Despite being disdained by Heaven’s angelic elite while being tortured by Hell’s roughneck “Evidence” specialists, Fool doggedly presses on with his inquiry, finding almost as many distressing similarities between Heaven and Hell as he does unsettling contrasts. Both, for instance, have bureaucracies that are arbitrary and shortsighted in dispensing judgment. “There are hierarchies even [in Heaven],” Fool thinks to himself. “Even in the place of perfection there are those who are more powerful, more perfect.” Soon, both hierarchies are goaded from uneasy détente to total war, and Fool finds himself running out of time and resources to figure out who, or what, is behind this unholy maelstrom. Unsworth’s conception of a spiritual universe where deeper understanding may itself be the greatest curse is as nuanced and ingenious as his depiction of “poor little Fool,” perhaps the most oddly endearing sleuth to come along in years. The scales are tipped a tad more toward gaudy savagery and gratuitous cruelty than toward more intellectual digressions and plot twists. Still, one suspects Thomas Fool will return, with more respect from readers than from his spiritual jailers.
It’s less a whodunit than a ripsnorter, with an emphasis on the ripping. Or maybe the snorting.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-53936-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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
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