Wickedly hilarious celebration of a typical, if slightly despicable, American family's blithe destruction at the hands of a satanic computer genius posing as the caretaker of a vast East Hampton estate. This time out, Simpson (The Fingerprints of Armless Mike, 1996, etc.) applies his Fay Weldonlike obsessions with modern evil to the particulars of the American have-it-all dream. The Hendersons, a good-looking clan of suburban strivers, are suddenly handed everything they could desire. Recruited as a one-man sales force for a heavily capitalized marketing firm, Gunn Henderson, a handsome, athletic, gun-collecting smoothie who can sell only to people he hates, takes his handsome wife Samantha, their sweetly innocent eight-year-old daughter and their obnoxiously rebellious teenager son to live in an enormous mansion at the far eastern edge of Long Island. The mansion, and its quirky staff, as well as a $250,000 salary, golf-club memberships, a limousine, and paid tuitions at private schools, are perks for Gunn, who hits the road to sell a ridiculous fad toy to five-and-dimes, leaving Samantha with nothing much to do but watch Brady, the estate's handsome, blue-eyed, oh-so-sensitive caretaker, swim nude in the pool. As Samantha is drawn to Brady (who is also our satanic computer genius), Gunn indulges himself on the road, falling in lust, then love, with his silicone-enhanced ``business associate'' Nita Garrett. Garrett, along with just about everyone else in this cynical tale, is part of Brady's elaborate, hi-tech revenge on teenager Gunn's father. Simple revenge, however, is not enough. Brady is also adapting his plot as a new computer game with the Hendersons as characters. Alas, though, the same flaws that make the family so gleefully corruptible must, in the end, bring Brady down, but not before Simpson can show how generous helpings of passion, sex, and luxury make fools of so many of us mortals. Trashy, nasty, and fun.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-553-10052-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying...
King (Under the Dome, 2009, etc.) adds counterfactual historian to his list of occupations.
Well, not exactly: The author is really turning in a sturdy, customarily massive exercise in time travel that just happens to involve the possibility of altering history. Didn’t Star Trek tell us not to do that? Yes, but no matter: Up in his beloved Maine, which he celebrates eloquently here (“For the first time since I’d topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Dery hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy”), King follows his own rules. In this romp, Jake Epping, a high-school English teacher (vintage King, that detail), slowly comes to see the opportunity to alter the fate of a friend who, in one reality, is hale and hearty but in another dying of cancer, no thanks to a lifetime of puffing unfiltered cigarettes. Epping discovers a time portal tucked away in a storeroom—don’t ask why there—and zips back to 1958, where not just his friend but practically everyone including the family pets smokes: “I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by.” A different world indeed: In this one, Jake, a sort of sad sack back in Reality 1, finds love and a new identity in Reality 2. Not just that, but he now sees an opportunity to unmake the past by inserting himself into some ugly business involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, various representatives of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and JFK in Dallas in the fall of 1963. It would be spoiling things to reveal how things turn out; suffice it to say that any change in Reality 2 will produce a change in Reality 1, not to mention that Oswald may have been a patsy, just as he claimed—or maybe not. King’s vision of one outcome of the Kennedy assassination plot reminds us of what might have been—that is, almost certainly a better present than the one in which we’re all actually living. “If you want to know what political extremism can lead to,” warns King in an afterword, “look at the Zapruder film.”
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying yarn.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2728-2
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Hoag finishes her crossover from sexy soft-cover romance to psychosexual thriller with this tale of tough Cajun loners looking for love in unlikely places. Heroine Annie Broussard is a deputy with the sheriff's office in Partout Parish in southern Louisiana. An orphan who's working hard to make detective, she's also devoted to getting rid of the sexual predators who victimize women. But just as her career seems to be looking up, Annie breaks an unwritten police law: She arrests a fellow officer, Nick Fourcade, when she finds him beating up a murder suspect. Annie should have let Fourcade kill him, say both her colleagues and the bayou parish citizens. After all, the suspect, Marcus Renard, had supposedly stalked Pam Bichon, a single mother. He'd driven stakes through her hands, raped her, killed her, eviscerated her, then left her wearing only a feathered Mardi Gras mask in a deserted cottage on Pony Bayou. Why not kill him? Switching his obsession from Pam to Annie, he maintains that he's innocent and begs Annie to help him. Working with Fourcade, who's suspended but still obsessed with the case, she seeks evidence to put the troubled Marcus legally behind bars. Meanwhile, someone's raping Louisiana women, and Marcus is too injured to be the perp. Is it Annie's lazy, mean-spirited colleague Stokes? Or Pam's husband, involved with a New Orleans racketeer from Fourcade's past? As Mardi Gras approaches, Annie, a cute kid who does 50 chin-ups a day and has an addiction to candy bars, wrestles with Fourcade's dangerous sexuality—fortunately a losing battle—and with the evil presence of deranged male predators that haunts so many recent suspense novels. Hoag (Guilty as Sin, 1996, etc.) is always a good gritty read, but this time a lack of sustained emotional tension makes the novel a long ride on soft tires.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-553-09960-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
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