A pretentiously self-conscious, lulling yet strangely pleasurable cross of Gulliver’s Travels and Pilgrim’s Progress with a...
Prolific British-born essayist and novelist Dyer’s second novel, a Kafkaesque road trip first published in 1993 in the U.K., appears for the first time in the U.S. along with his first novel, The Colour of Memory (reviewed in this issue).
The setting is a country resembling but not exactly replicating the United States in what might be the near future. Recently released from prison, Walker meets a beautiful woman named Rachel who hires him as a tracker, an illegal profession in a world where people frequently choose to disappear. Rachel wants him to find her husband, Malory, who did something unexplained that sent him on the run. Walker is to warn Malory that bad people are after him while getting Malory to sign and fingerprint some papers ensuring Rachel’s financial security when he's eventually arrested. So Walker, already more than half in love, sets off with a good-luck locket from Rachel and not much else. Since Malory has avoided being photographed, Rachel has only one blurry image of him. In a downward progression, an address gone cold leads to a phone number gone dead leads to a simple postmark. Walker gives up on clues to follow his intuition. He travels from city to city, some with familiar names that don’t connect to their actual geography, others with Bunyan-esque names like Despond and Independence. Sometimes Walker finds evidence that Malory has come and gone. He sees Malory in a crowd but loses him. He is stalked himself. The traveling becomes more important than finding Malory, until it culminates in a collection of snapshots that both clarify and cloud what the journey has been about for both Malory and Walker—snapshots, an occasional motif in Dyer’s first novel, become the central theme in his second.
A pretentiously self-conscious, lulling yet strangely pleasurable cross of Gulliver’s Travels and Pilgrim’s Progress with a little of the television cult show The Prisoner thrown in for good measure.Pub Date: May 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-55597-678-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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
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