by Timothy Hallinan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 17, 2010
Hallinan’s unlikely hero shines in this sometimes funny, always engrossing and undeniably authentic story that explores a...
Hallinan (Breathing Water, 2009, etc.) takes his Poke Rafferty series to the next level with this taut, offbeat and fast-moving thriller that focuses on Bangkok’s red-light district and sex trade.
Travel writer Poke has finally persuaded his live-in love Rose, a statuesque former bar girl in Bangkok’s Patpong district, to marry him. The couple and their adopted daughter Miaow are happy. Miaow, a former street urchin, is doing well in school and preparing for her part in an upcoming version of The Tempest; Rose’s cleaning service, which hires former bar workers, is successful; and Poke’s latest book is doing well. But as anyone familiar with Hallinan’s previous entries in this series knows, that much serendipity means Poke’s trouble meter is running. This time the trouble centers around Rose, who finds her past flooding back to haunt her in the worst possible form—a man she thought was dead pops up with the clear intention of not only disrupting her life, but taking it, along with the lives of the other people who matter to her. Poke is well aware of Rose’s past—he met her in a bar—but he had no clue as to what she endured at the hands of this man, or the detailed story of her journey from village girl to prostitute. In the second part of the novel, Rose poignantly tells her story, and this is where Hallinan’s writing really shines: Readers can feel the grime and poverty of village life, smell the streets of Bangkok, taste the fear when Rose—previously known as “Kwan”—fights for her life in her own, private version of The Tempest. Stalked by a resourceful killer dedicated to wiping out his family, Poke and his loyal and incorruptible friend, police officer Arthit, still mourning the loss of his wife, put together a plan to bring the hunter into the kill zone, hoping they can end the nightmare that began years ago in a Bangkok club.
Hallinan’s unlikely hero shines in this sometimes funny, always engrossing and undeniably authentic story that explores a dark and fascinating side of Thailand.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-167226-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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