Magnificent stuff. If Elmore Leonard broke out of genre and were 30 years younger, he’d be Richard Price.
The mastery of urban melodrama that Price demonstrated in literate blockbusters like Clockers (1992), and Freedomland (1998) keeps growing and deepening—as evidenced in his seventh novel.
It’s the story of a neighborhood and of conflicting ways of life, set in Price’s fictional Dempsy, New Jersey, not far from New York City. And its central figures are two 40-something former neighborhood acquaintances: white TV scriptwriter Ray Mitchell, who has returned from La-La-Land newly wealthy, to teach a writing course at his old high school—and, just possibly, reconnect with his teenaged daughter Ruby; and black police detective Nerese Ammons, whose planned early retirement is delayed when she learns that Ray has been savagely beaten by an assailant whom he refuses to identify. A virtuoso alternation of advancing action with detailed flashbacks shows how Nerese’s investigation into this mystery raises troublesome ghosts from the past, while also introducing a boldly drawn gallery of involved and potentially guilty characters. The prime suspects appear to be Danielle Martinez, the wife of a jailed drug dealer, with whom Ray has a brief, intense affair; the murderous Freddy Martinez himself; and Coley Rodgers (a.k.a. Salim El-Amin), a luckless denizen of Dempsy’s mean streets who takes mercenary advantage of liberal, big-hearted Ray’s impulses to be a good “Samaritan” to those less fortunate than he. That latter dynamic is analyzed with a ferocious admixture of bleak wit and sorrowful compassion, and the story positively vibrates with Price’s trademark virtues of pinpoint observation (e.g., Nerese notices a TV set “so recently purchased that a few minute shreds of static-charged packing foam still clung to the gunmetal-gray-frame”) and punchy dialogue (a onetime repeat offender wryly boasts, “I don’t just have a record, my man, I have a fucking album”). And the killer climax and ironic dénouement couldn’t be improved upon.
Magnificent stuff. If Elmore Leonard broke out of genre and were 30 years younger, he’d be Richard Price.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41115-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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