An entertaining neonoir about the wages of greed.
A man of modest ambitions falls under the spell of a shallow and rapacious billionaire.
Frank, when we meet him in 2000, just wants to build a high-quality house in Connecticut and start a new life after a failed relationship. Dmitry, the teenage son of distant acquaintances in England, happens to be around to help, though he’s an incompetent tradesman and his main talent is roping Frank (or “Franky,” as he calls him, much to Frank’s annoyance) into schemes redolent of prostitution and insurance fraud. Cutting the cord isn’t so simple for Frank, though: Over the dozen or so years after they meet, Dmitry pulls Frank into his orbit, be it for sleazy low-grade dalliances with women and drugs or sleazy high-stakes money laundering. “What sick shit within you responds to him?” a girlfriend asks Frank, and that’s the core question of the first novel by Lutz (And the Monkey Learned Nothing, 2016, etc.), editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Tonally, the novel aspires to be an intellectual thriller, heavy on the intellectual part; though the plot pivots on an explosion in 2013 that seems to have Dmitry’s hands on it, the story mainly follows Frank’s ongoing moral hand-wringing over multiple aspects of Dmitry’s life. Lutz carefully chronicles Frank’s inner storms (references to The Third Man are just one echo of Graham Greene here), though Dmitry is less resolved. Lutz alternates between making him a mere allegory of capitalist greed or an outright cartoon of it (right down to the oversized penis). “It would be a gigantic error to settle for being a capitalist pig when I can, with not an iota’s more effort, be an imperialist pig,” Dmitry declaims. The clash of sensibilities between Frank and Dmitry gives the novel a queasy frisson, though one wishes it had more to say about the mind of the pig.
An entertaining neonoir about the wages of greed.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-912248-64-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Repeater Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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