Local color is a plus as always, but Krueger’s plotting goes from uncertain to heavy-handed, while the unwaveringly virtuous...
In his fourth case (Purgatory Ridge, 2001, etc.), Cork O’Connor has to solve the mystery of who killed Charlotte Kane. But which Charlotte Kane?
Citizens of Aurora, Minnesota, are alarmed by a sudden rise in the community’s homicide rate. A few years back the trend would have been less unsettling because everyone trusted Sheriff Cork O’Connor, unlike the uniformed Humpty-Dumptys currently in charge of local law and order. But there’s enough cop left in the old campaigner to keep him poised and ready, so when 17-year-old Charlotte Kane, beautiful daughter of reclusive Dr. Fletcher Kane, turns up horribly murdered, Cork answers the call with a modest “someone ought to pay attention.” The rich field of suspects includes young Solemn Winter Moon, “a kind of Ojibwe Romeo” Charlotte had played around with for a while; Father Mal Thorne, a Catholic priest with a checkered past; and the worthy Dr. Kane himself, whose relationship with his daughter has a Krafft-Ebing subtext. But it’s not until a second corpse is also identified as that of Charlotte Kane that Cork fully understands the fine mess he’s expected to untangle.
Local color is a plus as always, but Krueger’s plotting goes from uncertain to heavy-handed, while the unwaveringly virtuous Cork crosses the edge and becomes too good to be interesting.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-4586-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
Relax, enjoy, and marvel anew at the power of unbridled fictional invention.
Rejoice, fans of American madness who’ve sought fulfillment in political reportage. South Florida’s master farceur (Skink—No Surrender, 2014, etc.) is back to reassure you that fiction is indeed stranger than truth.
Even though a prefatory note indicates that both the come-hither title and the stuff about giant Gambian pouched rats are rooted in reality, no one but Hiaasen could have dreamed up the complications arising from the collision of Merry Mansfield with talent agent Lane Coolman—a literal collision, since she rams his rented car while shaving her bikini area in the driver's seat of a Firebird. Make that multiple collisions, since Lane turns out to be only the latest victim of Merry and her partner Zeto’s kidnap-for-hire schemes. In this case, he’s the wrong victim, mistaken for beach-replenishment contractor Martin Trebeaux, whose swindling has put him on the wrong side of Calzone crime family capo Dominick "Big Noogie" Aeola. Since Coolman’s being held captive, he can’t be on hand to walk his client Buck Nance, the reality star of Bayou Brethren, though a personal appearance at the Parched Pirate, and Buck goes off script into a racist rant that sparks a demonstration and sends him fleeing, though he's still capable of inspiring Benny Krill, a murderous apprentice racist who dreams of joining him on his show. After laboring in vain to persuade Jon David Ampergrodt, his boss at Platinum Artists Management, as well as Merry and Zeto that he’s worth ransoming, Coolman escapes, but it doesn’t matter: he’s still confined in the zoo that’s Key West, where liability lawyer Brock Richardson’s fiancee loses the $200,000 ring he didn’t bother to resize after his fatter former fiancee returned it, and when his neighbor, health inspector Andrew Yancy, discovers it, he hides it in the hummus in the hope that an indefinite search for the bauble will stall Richardson’s plan to build a McMansion that will obstruct Yancy’s sea view. Etc. How can Hiaasen possibly tie together all this monkey business in the end? His delirious plotting is so fine-tuned that preposterous complications that would strain lesser novelists fit right into his antic world.
Relax, enjoy, and marvel anew at the power of unbridled fictional invention.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-34974-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
Readers who’ve always wanted to see Spenser in Tinseltown can cross that off their bucket lists.
Spenser goes to Hollywood.
In the two years since she’s moved from Cambridge to Los Angeles in pursuit of stardom, Gabrielle Leggett has been a dog walker, a personal assistant, a model, an actress, a media influencer, and now, for the past two weeks, a missing person. The LAPD knows about Gabby’s disappearance, but her mother, dissatisfied with their efforts, sends Spenser (Robert B. Parker’s Old Black Magic, 2018, etc.) out to the Left Coast to do the job right. Predictably, Gabby’s agent and former romantic partner, Eric Collinson, doesn’t want to talk to him. Neither does Jeffrey Bloom, the acting coach who thought Gabby had just dropped out of his class, or Jimmy Yamashiro, the married studio CEO who took Collinson’s place. And the only thing publicist Nancy Sharp, Gabby’s ex-boss, wants to talk about is how much fun she and Spenser could have if he’d only lighten up. Eventually Spenser works his contacts to get an audience with Yamashiro, but the results are less than impressive. He must be making an impression, though, because five Armenian thugs ambush him and shoot his West Coast associate, Zebulun Sixkill, in the arm, disabling him and requiring Spenser to look for another sidekick. Eventually he gets a lead that connects Gabby to Joseph Haldorn, aka Phaethon, the founder of HELIOS, a hush-hush organization that promises self-actualization and conducts itself suspiciously like a cult. But instead of thickening, the mystery surrounding Gabby just gets more violent and diffuse. Surprisingly, Atkins gets the hardest parts right—his hero/narrator now sounds indistinguishable from Robert B. Parker’s—but bogs down in the plotting, the area in which he presumably had the freest hand. As for the cod-out-of-water milieu, it evokes not so much particular SoCal locations as dozens of earlier SoCal whodunits.
Readers who’ve always wanted to see Spenser in Tinseltown can cross that off their bucket lists.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53682-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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