Two short plays and 42 stories from Vachss, who's known for his eight novels (see below) featuring PIs who hunt down child abusers and sex offenders. Most of these could be sketches for his longer works, and a terse introduction bravely dismisses the question of whether or not this volume is literature—rather, he explains, it's simply a necessary extension of his real job (Vachss is a lawyer who represents abused children). Aside from a few standard mini- thrillers with well-timed twists (e.g., ``It's A Hard World,'' about a man on the run from hired killers), the book proves that Vachss has exactly one subject—avenging crimes against helpless victims (boys, girls, and animals). But he's got it covered. Although he experiments with different points of view (rapist, rape victim, prosecutor, mercenary killer), his characters tend toward a single personality profile: careful, quiet, and methodical. Reading these quickies in succession doesn't offer the sustained eeriness of his novels; in most stories, his vigilantes serve justice swiftly, then coolly disappear into the night, after getting off on their well-executed vengeance the way the rapists get off on hurting their prey. Many of the stories have the Vachss staples of buzz-cut sentences and pedagogy on criminal psychology, but the title story may be the most interesting—because it raises the question potentially nagging at Vachss's readers. In the story, a killer writes in a catch-me- if-you-can letter to a criminal psychologist named Doc: ``Serial killer chic has invaded human consciousness. Perhaps you should be studying that phenomenon instead of wasting your time trying to analyze me.'' The relentlessness of this collection treads a thin line, because Vachss definitely has within him a perverse- chic sensibility. Read as a whole, the collection is drab and numbingly systematic—but it's full of exquisitely rendered atmosphere and detail about a world we'd hate to inhabit. Still, what can you do with a thick pile of short stories that even the author claims aren't writerly?
Pub Date: Aug. 29, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-75336-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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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