Not for the faint of heart, but this novel’s character studies and ever shifting plot will excite fans of English noir.
Dash (Sunburn, 2015) offers an ensemble drama about violence, drug addiction, and sex trafficking set in a bleak underworld of London mobsters.
The author spins a complex web of plots and characters in this novel, but at its heart are three very different personalities: Kevin Tyne, a desperate young man willing to sell his own sister, Tulip, into prostitution; Clint Smith, a film-obsessed nebbish who wishes he was a gangster; and Big Sandy, an enforcer so loyal to his gang that he’s willing to sacrifice himself at any moment. What draws them all together is a catastrophically powerful experimental drug that has the potential to hugely profit its owners and also lay waste to entire communities. Clint steals its formula and forms a tentative alliance with Kevin and other unsavory men, while Big Sandy is sent to steal it back. The book flaunts the grim panache of a London crime saga, and all the characters are engaging, no matter how despicable they are. But its world can also be hyperbolically awful, as when Kevin demands to watch men have sex with his sister or when Gawl McCaskey, a psychopathic thug, impulsively slashes the arm of a random stranger; even the priest, Father Sebastian, has unspeakable sexual appetites. The dialogue is full of macho declarations, as when a mobster threatens a captured drug dealer: “If you tell me where the money is and what happened to the formula, I’ll shoot you through the skull….Otherwise…you’ll squirm for hours in the kind of agony no human can dream about until they’re subjected to it. Your call.” As exploitative as Dash’s characters are, though, he provides plenty of back story to justify their actions and attitudes. In the end, the author seems to delight in punishing his protagonists for their sins by shooting, strangling, and battering the life out of them. As a result, for the first 400 pages or so, the story occupies a moral gray area, but in the final chapters, there’s no question who’s evil and who’s pure.
Not for the faint of heart, but this novel’s character studies and ever shifting plot will excite fans of English noir.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5077-3719-4
Page Count: 714
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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