A multifaceted and lively hero gives this offbeat LA caper a unique flair.
In Ramon’s novel, a troubled man undertakes a quest to find a missing child.
Los Angeles resident Cole Reeves is 21 years old. After being expelled from university and fired from his job at a coffee shop, Cole’s days tend to be relatively aimless. He goes on long walks through Koreatown, meets his friend Ray for lunch, and plays ping-pong with his other friend Jamal. He “lives for” electronic dance music and has an extensive collection of t-shirts. The t-shirts are more than just clothing—his selection process is something of a ceremony, as he finds that the shirts guide him “through existence each day.” Cole’s existence can be tumultuous: He takes prescription medicine for his mental health, and Jamal has playfully nicknamed him “51-50,” a nod to the police code for a crazy person. Still, people like Cole; women flirt with him, random children speak with him, and when a local boy is kidnapped, Cole feels a compulsion to help. As Cole goes about his search, struggling with his own mental well-being, people often mistake him for someone else—it seems they may even be mistaking him for the kidnapper. The police certainly have their suspicions. Is Cole experiencing some kind of psychotic break? Is he connected to the kidnapper in a way that he doesn’t fully understand? Perhaps his t-shirts will provide some kind of guidance; maybe a local news personality will understand that Cole is only trying to help. Or could it be that he is just another crazy person in a sprawling city teeming with them?
Cole is a likeable, memorable, and unpredictable main character. At any given moment, he may vividly recall a traumatic moment he thought he had forgotten or decide that the time has come to go out dancing at an illegal rave. (On the benefits of the latter, he explains, “getting lost in a sea of people makes me feel more alive than anything else.”) Part of Cole’s appeal is the ease with which he shares his feelings. He also reflects on the mundane, such as how a restaurant has “fantastic meat that is not prepared like Korean barbecue even though it’s a Korean restaurant”; it all adds to the catalog of the many joys he manages to find in the world. The idea that Cole could be the same person who is involved in the disappearance of a child keeps the reader on their toes. Some of this intrigue is blunted by his interactions with supporting characters: For instance, he has a friendly relationship with a blind Korean woman named Mrs. Kim. She is a shaman who deals in traditional Korean medicine and is capable of amazing things—like determining which t-shirt Cole is wearing despite the fact that she is blind. When Cole seeks her council about his desire to help with the kidnapping case, she warns him bluntly that this “will be a difficult task” albeit a “noble one”; Cole probably could have figured that much out himself. Still, it’s compelling to see how the whole complicated situation plays out, especially with this unemployed, t-shirt-crazed, ping-pong-playing protagonist at the center.
A multifaceted and lively hero gives this offbeat LA caper a unique flair.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9798350934281
Page Count: 250
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
