A fine procedural augmented by beefy subplots and a pitiable villain.
In the latest installment of Williams’ (Ace, 2015, etc.) thriller series, police detective Salvador Mitchell dodges assassins and deals with a surprise inheritance while a grieving father plans an explosive retribution.
Mitchell is understandably taken aback by the news of his mother Cora’s death in a helicopter crash in Costa Rica. But he’s outright shocked when attorney V.E. McNamara informs him that Cora’s estate, to which Mitchell’s entitled, is worth anywhere from $10 million to $30 million due to the respect that her paintings have garnered in the art world. A condition of the inheritance, however, is that Mitchell must leave his job as a homicide detective in the city of Salento, which he isn’t ready to do. His girlfriend, Mya Laing, would prefer that he turn in his shield, especially when it’s clear that people are trying to kill him—likely gang members seeking revenge for their boss’s death. Meanwhile, retired city engineer Kerak Daniluk is still mourning his engineer son, Wil, who died in an allegedly job-related accident. Kerak is distraught over the city’s apathetic handling of Wil’s death, so he plots vengeance, slowly amassing components for explosives—and his path soon crosses with Mitchell’s. Despite the presence of returning characters, including Mitchell, Laing, and Mitchell’s partner, Eddie “Sandman” Sandovan, the standout in Williams’ fourth series entry is Kerak. Despite his terrible goals, he’s quite sympathetic, and his plan is so methodical that the story never lingers on its potential malice. When it appears that nosy hunters might catch on to what Kerak’s doing, readers will see them more as obstacles than as potential heroes. Other assorted subplots, including one involving Laing’s ad-executive job, eventually tie into the main storyline, as well, sometimes in unexpected ways. Mitchell himself proves capable when facing hit men, but there’s only a modicum of detective work this time around given everything else that he has to deal with. Williams’ vivid descriptions also leave their mark: “The cityscape was a gallimaufry of varying architectural styles and lighting…bright white metal halides sparkled like diamonds.”
A fine procedural augmented by beefy subplots and a pitiable villain.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5455-4841-7
Page Count: 330
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the elusive Pynchon regularly cranked out novels, then this latest addition to his semi-classic oeuvre would be considered an excellent, if flawed, fiction, not as demanding and complex as Gravity's Rainbow, nor as neat and clever as The Crying of Lot 49 and V. As it is, coming 17 years since the last book, it's something of a disappointment.
Yes, it's compulsively funny, full of virtuoso riffs, and trenchant in its anarcho-libertarian social commentary. But there's a missing dimension in this tale of post-Sixties malaise—a sense of characters being more than an accumulation of goofy allusions and weird behavior. And all of its winding, conspiratorially digressive plot adds up to a final moment of apparently unintentional kitsch—a limp scene reuniting a girl and her dog. Built on flashbacks to the 60's, the story reenacts in 1984 the struggles that refuse to disappear. Not politics really, but the sense of solidarity and betrayal that marks both periods for the numerous characters that wander into this fictional vortex. At the center is Frenesi (Free and Easy) Gates, who's anything but. A red-diaper baby and radical film-maker during the rebellion-charged 60's, Frenesi sold her soul to a man in uniform, the quintessential Nixon-Reagan fascist, Brock Vond, a fed whose manic pursuit of lefties and dopers finds him abusing civil rights over three decades. He's motivated not just by innate evil, but by his obsession with Frenesi, whom he sets up as a sting-operation expert protected under the Witness Protection Program. Meanwhile, the venomous Vond sees to it that Frenesi's hippie husband, Zoyd Wheeler, and her daughter, Prairie, are "disappeared" to Vineland, the northern California town where L.A. counterculturalists lick their collective wounds among the redwoods, and bemoan "the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into." Brilliant digressions on Californian left-wing history, the saga of The People's Republic of Rock and Roll, a Mob wedding, and the living dead known as the Thanatoids all come bathed in the clarity of Pynchon's eye-popping language.
Pynchon's latest should prove to the legions of contemporary scribbler-fakers that it isn't enough to reproduce pop-schlock on the page, it needs to be siphoned through the kind of imaginative genius on display everywhere here.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1990
ISBN: 0141180633
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1990
PERSPECTIVES
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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