Bloodthirsty and thrumming, an original take on the source material.
A crime boss is brought down by treachery and jealousy in this retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello.
The Commission crime syndicate is headed locally by Joe Hamlet, who oversees a group of five clans that’s fairly small but still ripe for takeover. That’s the aim of Othello Moore, a new arrival who, with his crew, brutally slaughters Commission players. Convinced Othello couldn’t pull it off without backing from an insider, Joe vows to discover the culprit. Othello gives up the traitor in return for a seat at the table, creating an uneasy alliance. Things get even more tangled when Othello and Mona, Joe’s daughter, fall in love and a succession crisis looms in the Commission. In different ways, these events drive a wedge between Othello and his chief lieutenants, Cassio and Macklin Bethel, aka Cash and Mac. Resentful at being passed over for promotion, Mac hatches a scheme to stoke Othello’s insecurities and convince him Mona has cheated on him with Cash, a good-looking player. Meanwhile, Aphrodite, Joe’s wife, strives for the success of their son, Adonis, who is secretly gay and whom Joe considers weak. Plots and counterplots turn fortune’s wheel toward tragedy. In his follow-up to Gods & Gangsters (2020), SLMN makes only passing reference to that novel. This outing also delivers blood, violence, and hardcore sex, sometimes all in the same scene. The writing is skillfully evocative, and readers will appreciate the excitement of a high-stakes power play. Some may be turned off by the cruelty and the rampant sexual humiliation, nearly always of women (“Mac grabbed a handful of Milk’s hair and slapped her across the face with his dick”). The Shakespeare connection, which includes allusions to such plays as Macbeth and Hamlet as well as Othello, makes for intriguing parallels with their themes of gory revenge, corrosive jealousy, and vaulting ambition.
Bloodthirsty and thrumming, an original take on the source material.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9996390-1-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Kingston Imperial
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A weird, wild ride.
Celebrity scandal and a haunted lake drive the narrative in this bestselling author’s latest serving of subtly ironic suspense.
Sager’s debut, Final Girls (2017), was fun and beautifully crafted. His most recent novels—Home Before Dark (2020) and Survive the Night (2021) —have been fun and a bit rickety. His new novel fits that mold. Narrator Casey Fletcher grew up watching her mother dazzle audiences, and then she became an actor herself. While she never achieves the “America’s sweetheart” status her mother enjoyed, Casey makes a career out of bit parts in movies and on TV and meatier parts onstage. Then the death of her husband sends her into an alcoholic spiral that ends with her getting fired from a Broadway play. When paparazzi document her substance abuse, her mother exiles her to the family retreat in Vermont. Casey has a dry, droll perspective that persists until circumstances overwhelm her, and if you’re getting a Carrie Fisher vibe from Casey Fletcher, that is almost certainly not an accident. Once in Vermont, she passes the time drinking bourbon and watching the former supermodel and the tech mogul who live across the lake through a pair of binoculars. Casey befriends Katherine Royce after rescuing her when she almost drowns and soon concludes that all is not well in Katherine and Tom’s marriage. Then Katherine disappears….It would be unfair to say too much about what happens next, but creepy coincidences start piling up, and eventually, Casey has to face the possibility that maybe some of the eerie legends about Lake Greene might have some truth to them. Sager certainly delivers a lot of twists, and he ventures into what is, for him, new territory. Are there some things that don’t quite add up at the end? Maybe, but asking that question does nothing but spoil a highly entertaining read.
A weird, wild ride.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18319-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.
The ne’er-do-well son of a successful Irish American family gets dragged into criminal complications that suggest the rest of the Devlins aren’t exactly the upstanding citizens they appear.
The first 35 years in the life of Thomas “TJ” Devlin have been one disappointment after another to his parents, lawyers who founded a prosperous insurance and reinsurance firm, and his more successful siblings, John and Gabby. A longtime alcoholic who’s been unemployable ever since he did time for an incident involving his ex-girlfriend Carrie’s then 2-year-old daughter, TJ is nominally an investigator for Devlin & Devlin, but everyone knows the post is a sinecure. Things change dramatically when golden-boy John tells TJ that he just killed Neil Lemaire, an accountant for D&D client Runstan Electronics. Their speedy return to the murder scene reveals no corpse, so the brothers breathe easier—until Lemaire turns up shot to death in his car. John’s way of avoiding anything that might jeopardize his status as heir apparent to D&D is to throw TJ under the bus, blaming him for everything John himself has done and adding that you can’t trust anything his brother has said since he’s fallen off the wagon. TJ, who’s maintained his sobriety a day at a time for nearly two years, feels outraged, but neither the police investigating the murder nor his nearest and dearest care about his feelings. Forget the forgettable mystery, whose solution will leave you shrugging instead of gasping, and focus on the circular firing squad of the Devlins, and you’ll have a much better time than TJ.
As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780525539704
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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