A wonderfully written thriller with Big Sky country as a setting.
Montana Voice podcast host Saroff debuts with a novel about an enigmatic loner who attracts strange characters as he tries to do good—or repair the bad he has done.
Enzi is much like Saroff: a runaway and a dyslexic who started with nothing. But he discovers a talent for—and a fascination with—math and winds up a successful computer coder with his own company. But he has come under the sway of Tommy Tsai, a very smooth and very, very bad guy, and gets drawn into cybercrime. At the same time, he posts bail for, and falls half in love with, a young woman named Kaori, an unbalanced Japanese artist prone to not just violent mood swings, but violence itself. Halfway through the novel, the Kaori story takes a back seat to Enzi’s desperate fight to break Tsai’s hold over him. It’s unwise to try to walk away from Tommy Tsai, who has murderous contacts, and true to thriller conventions, the plot involves a race against time. The story is set in Montana (mostly Missoula), and Enzi can wax eloquent about the surrounding mountains and streams. That’s one way his tale has something of the spirit of Hemingway stories like “Up in Michigan.” Another is that his spare—for the most part—prose seems designed to step out of the way but is arresting in itself. But Saroff is also capable of lyric flights and striking metaphors, referring in one passage to “the self-created legal clockwork of his [father’s] ruin.” One of Enzi’s allies is a bail bondsman named Pascal Ameto, a source of practical wisdom who is very like Enzi in his manner and a true friend in a strange way, who addresses Enzi simply as “a Fella” (“A Fella should probably have a drink with me later”). And Pascal has his own interesting stories to tell. It’s no spoiler to say that by the end, Enzi is on his own in the desert, starting over or that that’s the story of his life.
A wonderfully written thriller with Big Sky country as a setting.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2022
ISBN: 979-8985703832
Page Count: 205
Publisher: Flooding Island
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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