An overlong novel that’s weighed down by unnecessary digressions.
In Steele’s novel, a parole officer stumbles on a web of corruption at work.
Cleveland “Cleve” Ishmael works for the Department of Corrections in Kumhokot County, Pennsylvania; more specifically, he works for the Home Detention Unit, which oversees inmates who’ve been permitted to serve out their sentences in the confines of their own residences. Readers quickly understand that he’s witnessed some sort of grave corruption in his own ranks, and that he felt compelled to discuss it with an authority. However, the details are revealed at a numbingly slow pace over more than 600 pages. Eventually, Cleve notes that he happened upon some irregularities in the casefiles of a fellow parole officer, who mysteriously vanished. As Cleve investigated further, he uncovered a dark tangle of impropriety and crime, which included unspeakable injustices. The book is framed as a transcript of Cleve’s responses to questions asked by a mental health clinician, who’s evaluating his fitness for work, given the clear signs of PTSD he’s exhibiting.The interview is wide-ranging, as the protagonist discusses his family lineage, his childhood, and the death of his parents, all in a style so unhurried that he repeatedly notes the fact that it drifts off-topic. In an afterword, Steele declares his intention to “satirize…hateful, cruel rhetoric and attitudes to the point of ironic caricature.” However, the book delivers no real satire; instead, readers experience the childish crudeness of Cleve, who repeatedly refers to the clinician with epithets such as “dumb fuck” and “numb-nuts,” and to people in his profession as “cock-swallowing thunder-cunts.” Indeed, he seems to delight in using offensive terminology: “I use the term retard a lot, and it upsets you, because maybe you know a retard, and he’s a good guy, or maybe she’s your daughter and you love her, or maybe you’re in love with one.” None of this is particularly dark or funny, which challenges Steele’s announcement that it’s a work of “dark, comedic fiction.” The novel’s singular virtue is its description of the “Democratic-political machine” in Pennsylvania, and its well-documented, labyrinthine corruption.
An overlong novel that’s weighed down by unnecessary digressions.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798375696133
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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