A clever little slice of gun fu, powered on popcorn and airplane-glue fumes.
A coke dealer pisses off the wrong guy and winds up with seven psychotic killers on his trail.
The beauty of a pseudonym is that it allows a writer to start over, unburdened from the preconceptions of their previous work (looking at you Robert Galbraith and Benjamin Black). Here, a previously published writer offers a blistering fast, rat-a-tat urban thriller starring a fast-tongued white-collar criminal who might be crazy. Jack Price is a relative nobody who deals high-end coke to anyone who can afford it. Things go awry when someone clips Jack’s downstairs neighbor, an old lady named Didi, and then sends some goons around to beat him up. Technically, there’s a plot here somewhere—something involving a rich do-gooder named Sean Harper and an Icelandic dark web portal called Poltergeist—but it’s really just window dressing to set a gang of assassins called Seven Demons on Jack’s ass. But Jack, though sweet on his lawyer, Sarah, is homicidally crafty in his own way, for instance, keeping a crazy homeless man locked in a warehouse wearing clothes covered in knives, you know, just in case. Or buying a bunch of competing cocaine, cutting it with anthrax, and then slinging it back into circulation. Or shooting his own dirty cop for nothing more than expedience: “We hug. And then I shoot him in the face. Small caliber goes phht and one of his eyes goes red and that’s it. Sorry not sorry.” Jack’s fast-paced, expletive-heavy monologue works overtime as he faces down his foes one by one, among them a street fighter, his own enforcer, a shadowy sniper, and a preternaturally gifted, semipsychotic sex doctor who practices her own dark arts on Jack. The book is more Looney Tunes than criminal noir, but it’s an entertaining trifle, piquant with its Tarantino-light aesthetics and a narrative voice that recalls early Charlie Huston.
A clever little slice of gun fu, powered on popcorn and airplane-glue fumes.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3337-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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
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