History has caught up to Wesley’s bleak odyssey, repeatedly rejected for publication decades ago but now unnervingly...
Vachss’ very first novel, often plundered for his later fiction (That’s How I Roll, 2012, etc.) but never before published, traces the rise, or fall, of a homegrown terrorist.
To the untrained eye, Wesley never looks like anything but a loser. Headed for conviction in a gang fight, he agrees to enlist in the service instead of going to jail, but this time, the army doesn’t build men, and he’s tossed out of Korea with an undesirable discharge and soon headed for prison again. He falls under the sway of Carmine Trentoni, a gang leader who becomes his role model and guru, dispensing yards of Vachss’ trademark bitter wisdom (“think about the person you hate most in the world and smile”). Trentoni aims to turn Wesley into his legacy, an ice-cold hit man who’ll carry on the mobster’s enduring battle against the Man. Once he’s outlived his mentor and served his time, Wesley follows Trentoni’s detailed instructions, finding the cash Trentoni hid, contacting the mysterious gang lord Mr. Petraglia and setting up a rapid series of hits as precisely planned as they are brutal. But Wesley’s nihilism is deeper than Trentoni’s, and his escalating war against the establishment claims hundreds of victims: “[t]he people in the crowd on West 51st who got bombed by the grenade, the junkies blown up by the booby-trapped bag, whoever was within the fallout range of the building on Chrystie, the methadone clinic, the girl in the massage parlor….” After watching the effects of his assassination of Haitian dictator Papa Du’s son, Wesley realizes that not even his scorched-earth violence can bring about political change, and he prepares his own chilling exit.
History has caught up to Wesley’s bleak odyssey, repeatedly rejected for publication decades ago but now unnervingly prescient.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-95085-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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