Even with an overcooked plot, Baker’s narrative drive keeps you pressing ahead, and his style shows just enough energy and...
Once more into the rabbit hole of conspiracies-in-high-places we go, this time through a noirish farrago of mid-20th century bad craziness.
In this rowdy pastiche of hard-boiled homage and alternative history, Baker assumes the daunting challenge of moving several sets of characters through three time frames. In one story arc, set in the summer of 1960, an LA private detective is hired by a wheelchair-bound megalomaniacal billionaire to recover his kidnapped child. In another, set in the fall of 1963, a professional hit man struggles to retain some individual honor as he gets entangled in a plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. And in present-day Dallas, an investigative journalist sifts through speculations, crackpot and otherwise, linking the kidnapping and JFK’s murder. Baker’s debut novel packs riffs and motifs borrowed from myriad American crime classics along with brutal, often graphic depictions of murder and mutilation. All of which is served with a heaping, steaming plate of paranoid scenarios involving, as one character has it, “The Mafia. Big Oil. The Intelligence Community. The Military Industrial Complex.” Along with the aforementioned characters and a motley (and familiar) assortment of sultry, secretive women and dim and/or brutal cops, the storylines are chockablock with cameos from such real-life personages as Sal Mineo, Chicago mobster Johnny Roselli, Howard Hughes, JFK in flagrante delicto, and Lee Harvey Oswald. There’s little if any verisimilitude in this blend that hasn’t been handled to deeper, richer effect by Don DeLillo and James Ellroy. And the whole raging mélange culminates in a plot twist that is just a shade beyond cute. Any one of his three storylines could have made a more satisfying novel than the one Baker slaps together here like a panini.
Even with an overcooked plot, Baker’s narrative drive keeps you pressing ahead, and his style shows just enough energy and romance to make you think he could get better with this genre thing as he goes along.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60945-287-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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