Murder most foul and mayhem most entertaining. Another worthy page-turner from a protean master.
The ever prolific King moves from his trademark horror into the realm of the hard-boiled noir thriller.
“He’s not a normal person. He’s a hired assassin, and if he doesn’t think like who and what he is, he’ll never get clear.” So writes King of his title character, whom the Las Vegas mob has brought in to rub out another hired gun who’s been caught and is likely to talk. Billy, who goes by several names, is a complex man, a Marine veteran of the Iraq War who’s seen friends blown to pieces; he’s perhaps numbed by PTSD, but he’s goal-oriented. He’s also a reader—Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin figures as a MacGuffin—which sets his employer’s wheels spinning: If a reader, then why not have him pretend he’s a writer while he’s waiting for the perfect moment to make his hit? It wouldn’t be the first writer, real or imagined, King has pressed into service, and if Billy is no Jack Torrance, there’s a lovely, subtle hint of the Overlook Hotel and its spectral occupants at the end of the yarn. It’s no spoiler to say that whereas Billy carries out the hit with grim precision, things go squirrelly, complicated by his rescue of a young woman—Alice—after she’s been roofied and raped. Billy’s revenge on her behalf is less than sweet. As a memoir grows in his laptop, Billy becomes more confident as a writer: “He doesn’t know what anyone else might think, but Billy thinks it’s good,” King writes of one day’s output. “And good that it’s awful, because awful is sometimes the truth. He guesses he really is a writer now, because that’s a writer’s thought.” Billy’s art becomes life as Alice begins to take an increasingly important part in it, crisscrossing the country with him to carry out a final hit on an errant bad guy: “He flopped back on the sofa, kicked once, and fell on the floor. His days of raping children and murdering sons and God knew what else were over.” That story within a story has a nice twist, and Billy’s battered copy of Zola’s book plays a part, too.
Murder most foul and mayhem most entertaining. Another worthy page-turner from a protean master.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982173-61-6
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Tense, claustrophobic, and a bit hard to swallow.
When a girl frozen in ice at the Arctic Circle thaws out alive, an ancient Nordic languages specialist with troubles of her own is called to the scene.
Ferencik—author of Into the Jungle (2019)—specializes in thrillers set in wilderness environments with female protagonists; her latest takes us to the land of subzero temperatures and wind-whipped polar landscapes. But bad weather is just the beginning of the unpleasantness Val Chesterfield encounters when she overcomes her many phobias to fly out and help climate scientist Wyatt Speeks with his perplexing specimen. The girl he chopped out of the wall of a crevasse and defrosted is terrified, violent, and unintelligible. While Wyatt is creepy on many levels, creepiest of all is his unwillingness to discuss the death by exposure of his erstwhile lab partner, Val's twin brother, Andy. Andy's having gotten locked out of the house overnight in his underwear has been presented as a suicide, but neither Val nor her father, also a climate scientist, believe it. Belief is a problem all through this book—the elements made up to serve the plot rest on a foundation of real climate science, linguistics, and cultural history but still don't manage to be convincing. The five characters—Val, Wyatt, a nasty cook, and a pair of married marine scientists—are also less than lifelike. Saddled with mental health issues and bad manners, their interactions range from rude to abusive except for the married couple, who are so in love it's nauseating. You really wouldn't want to be stuck in a room with these people, which poor Val is much of the time, and now someone has stolen her anxiety meds and hidden the booze! She finds herself becoming deeply attached to the mystery girl, but progress with communication is slow, and the girl's health takes a drastic turn for the worse. And then they all go outside and things get crazy.
Tense, claustrophobic, and a bit hard to swallow.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9821-4302-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
A complex case fraught with angst and danger ends with surprising revelations.
Webb leaves behind her Birmingham police procedurals to focus on an investigator in Nashville who faces long odds in getting her life back on track.
Finley O’Sullivan is the only child of a powerful local family. She rarely sees her mother, a judge, but she maintains a warm relationship with her father and is blessed with a lifelong friendship with Matthew Quinn, a high-powered lawyer who always has her back. She’s especially treasured that friendship ever since the murder of her husband, Derrick, caused a breakdown that put paid to her job as an assistant district attorney. Instead, Finley’s taken a job as an investigator for alcoholic lawyer Jack Finnegan, an old family friend who’s working on a case that will change her life again. Charles Holmes, who’s in prison for multiple homicides, now claims that the murder of Lance Legard, a big man in the music scene, was not one of his. Lance’s widow, Sophia, hires Jack, her ex-lover, to protect the interests of her twin daughters, Cecelia and Olivia, whose father was suspected of molesting them. Cecelia lives at home and never goes out; Olivia graduated from college and moved to California. Finley still lives in the half-finished house Derrick bought when they married, but now she starts to learn things that shake her faith in him. Messy affairs and a love-hate relationship between the twins are only a few of the things that the highly intuitive Finley must work through to solve the mystery.
A complex case fraught with angst and danger ends with surprising revelations.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-3543-9
Page Count: 315
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
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