Familiar, but fun all the same.
Mississippi Burning meets CSI as a forensic anthropologist and a down-on-his-luck FBI agent join forces to unravel a 40-year-old civil-rights crime in this well-done debut.
In the summer of 1965, the body of an obscure civil-rights activist named Leon Jackson washed out of a flooded river levee near Split Tree, Ark. A month later, digging in the same levee, the FBI came across the dead body of a young white male. This second body was never identified, and the case was never closed—which is why Special Agent Michael Levine and Army anthropologist Robert McKelvey find themselves prowling around town trying to shed some light on the decades-old killings. Split Tree, though, is the sort of place that doesn’t give up its secrets easily, something the pair learn as they butt heads with Waymond Elmore, the area’s none-too-accommodating sheriff, and his vaguely menacing errand boy/deputy Jimbo Bevins. In structure, it’s a fairly ambitious first effort as Holland (the scientific director of the Department of Defense’s Central Identification Laboratory) does a nice job juggling his chosen handful of plotlines, flashbacks and back stories. The odd-couple shtick that develops between New Yorker G-man Levine and southern scientist McKelvey is the stale stuff of your standard buddy-pic, but it still manages to amuse. The author overloads the pages with scattershot imagery but proves a steady hand at maintaining the story’s momentum, slowly escalating the tension as Levine and McKelvey put together Split Tree’s tragic past piece-by-piece, revealing just what happened at the levee 40 years ago and, in the process, adding a third body to the town’s toll.
Familiar, but fun all the same.Pub Date: May 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-7991-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
An exciting, thought-provoking mind-bender.
In Crouch’s sci-fi–driven thriller, a machine designed to help people relive their memories creates apocalyptic consequences.
In 2018, NYPD Detective Barry Sutton unsuccessfully tries to talk Ann Voss Peters off the edge of the Poe Building. She claims to have False Memory Syndrome, a bewildering condition that seems to be spreading. People like Ann have detailed false memories of other lives lived, including marriages and children, but in “shades of gray, like film noir stills.” For some, like Ann, an overwhelming sense of loss leads to suicide. Barry knows loss: Eleven years ago, his 15-year-old daughter, Meghan, was killed by a hit-and-run driver. Details from Ann’s story lead him to dig deeper, and his investigation leads him to a mysterious place called Hotel Memory, where he makes a life-altering discovery. In 2007, a ridiculously wealthy philanthropist and inventor named Marcus Slade offers neuroscientist Helena Smith the chance of a lifetime and an unlimited budget to build a machine that allows people to relive their memories. He says he wants to “change the world.” Helena hopes that her mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, will benefit from her passion project. The opportunity for unfettered research is too tempting to turn down. However, when Slade takes the research in a controversial direction, Helena may have to destroy her dream to save the world. Returning to a few of the themes he explored in Dark Matter (2016), Crouch delivers a bullet-fast narrative and raises the stakes to a fever pitch. A poignant love story is woven in with much food for thought on grief and the nature of memories and how they shape us, rounding out this twisty and terrifying thrill ride.
An exciting, thought-provoking mind-bender.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-5978-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
Enough characters, confrontations, secrets, and subplots to fill the stage of an opera house—and leave spectators from the...
After an absence of five years, Hart finds more to mine in the fertile land of the Southern gothic.
Hart returns brimming with plotlines and melodramatics. For starters, there are three emotionally and physically wounded characters. Front and center stands Elizabeth Black, a detective on the police force in an unnamed North Carolina city. Feisty, irrepressible Elizabeth has been furloughed after an incident in a cellar in which she pumped 18 bullets into two men who had bound and raped an 18-year-old girl named Channing. "Hero Cop or Angel of Death?" ask headlines, as a formal investigation into possibly excessive force looms likely. Elizabeth is also obsessed with Adrian Wall, an ex-cop in prison for the murder of Julia Strange. Black insists he’s innocent; she also suspects she loves him. And so she ignores department orders to stay away from Wall, seeking him out soon after he’s released from prison. Meanwhile, in a vivid scene that opens the book, Julia Strange’s son, Gideon, a 14-year-old whose “thoughts [run] crooked sometimes,” lights out from home and his father, “an empty man,” to shoot Wall the morning he walks free. Elizabeth, Channing, and Gideon are linked by troubled relationships with their parents, and the offsprings’ efforts to surmount the discord becomes a major theme in the book. There are, as well, other pertinent tropes—Wall’s case eventually raises issues of police corruption and prison abuse. Threaded through the steadily paced plot is a series of cross-cuts to the first-person narration of an unidentified man, a lurking bogeyman who moves, unobserved, among the other characters as he kidnaps and tortures several women. His identity is not hard to guess, and the familiarity of his scenes, however chilling, mars the plotting. A protracted action scene resolves the strands of the plot, and a touching epilogue lends a closing note of poignancy.
Enough characters, confrontations, secrets, and subplots to fill the stage of an opera house—and leave spectators from the orchestra to the balcony moved and misty-eyed.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-312-38036-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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