An immersive and rigorous rebellion drama hampered by a plethora of details.
In this debut historical novel, designs for a revolution take shape as unrest grows in Boston.
Johnson’s story opens on the day after the Boston Tea Party in 1773, when American colonists boarded ships in the city’s harbor and threw tea overboard to protest a new tax. Just after dawn, two redcoat soldiers find two faceless bodies bobbing in the water. The author carefully and meticulously examines the fallout from such events and dramatizes both sides of the rising conflict. The top brass of Britain tries to figure out how to extinguish the emergent rebel spirit. The Colonial leaders—figures such as John Adams, Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and John Hancock—discuss their next moves. The book features 45 chapters; each one is broken into subchapters and stamped with a date and location. Johnson’s favorite place is Snug Harbor Tavern, a pub and brothel. Disgruntled colonists meet there, but agents of Britain use the tavern, too. Zeke Teezle, one such agent, is torn between helping his fellow colonists stir up a rebellion and earning good pay from the crown for spying. The Sons of Liberty have their lofty principles, but at the tavern, colonists abide by a simpler principle: “Shaggin’ for a shillin’.” The author tries to show that the heroes of history had human desires. For example, he depicts Hancock moments after sex with a prostitute: “He was still sweating a bit from the carnal tumble they had just luxuriated in.” The novel is well researched, but Johnson’s inclusive approach to historical details bogs the book down. Every chapter is stuffed with exposition, explanations, and historical minutiae. Sometimes this urge to explain works its way into the dialogue, making it wooden and odd. At one point, Revere asserts: “Not bragging, but I’m probably the best horseman in this area; and that’s what I do…I ride.” Still, the author’s choice to set the tale in this time and place gives it an inherent energy; the work successfully depicts Boston as a pot of unrest about to boil over.
An immersive and rigorous rebellion drama hampered by a plethora of details.Pub Date: July 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5462-4990-0
Page Count: 714
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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