A deliberately convoluted detective tale that occasionally stumbles but consistently delights.
The presence of a potential terrorist group and a serial killer’s return amp up two private investigators’ deceptively simple caseload in this thriller.
Harry Powell may have made the right call when informing cops of Larry Janakowsky’s dead body at the New York hotel where Harry works security. His boss, however, promptly fires him, apparently for calling her at night. Janakowsky had been a private eye in Wilmington, North Carolina, the same place where Bernie Mannion asks Harry to help at his private detective agency. Janakowsky’s scrawled note, meanwhile, seems to associate armed forces–protesting radicals, the Military Liberation Front, with an upcoming Wilmington July 4th celebration. Sure enough, the group’s in North Carolina and includes David Dodd, a Marine who may be court-martialed for involving himself with government protesters. (Bernie’s looking into that via client —and David’s lawyer—JD Henzlein.) The mysterious death of Col. Bogart, reputedly spearheading the court-martial, is certainly suspicious. Meanwhile, missing girls who are turning up dead share similarities with recently uncovered skeletal remains of 12 women in Lebanon, Indiana, buried for nearly a decade. Only readers know that serial killer Lloyd Curtin, now a Wilmington resident, is methodically choosing his victims. Bernie’s finding his office ransacked and Harry’s dodging gunshots must mean that the gumshoes are getting close to exposing a killer—or terrorists. Olsinski (Death by RX, 2009) creates an intricate web connecting characters and subplots. Though they rely on happenstance too often, the links generate endless surprises. Lloyd, for one, is blood-related to a significant character, while David’s Army sister Carolyn once had a relationship with Harry. Characters are equally complex, with some, like Harry and Carolyn, with tragedies in their pasts. Others are darkly humorous: Lloyd, proud of his pirate ancestry, is upset the media’s dubbed him the Goat Man; the Lebanon bodies were found near a goat farm. Notable mistakes unfortunately mar the narrative: conflicting reports put the Indiana victims’ ages at all under 30 and also late 20s to early 30s; and Bernie tells colleagues his Lebanon cop nephew Robert is his cousin. Nevertheless, the book ends on a high note, a realistic conclusion in which not every murder is solved.
A deliberately convoluted detective tale that occasionally stumbles but consistently delights.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941859-38-4
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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