Not for the faint of heart, but this novel’s character studies and ever shifting plot will excite fans of English noir.
Dash (Sunburn, 2015) offers an ensemble drama about violence, drug addiction, and sex trafficking set in a bleak underworld of London mobsters.
The author spins a complex web of plots and characters in this novel, but at its heart are three very different personalities: Kevin Tyne, a desperate young man willing to sell his own sister, Tulip, into prostitution; Clint Smith, a film-obsessed nebbish who wishes he was a gangster; and Big Sandy, an enforcer so loyal to his gang that he’s willing to sacrifice himself at any moment. What draws them all together is a catastrophically powerful experimental drug that has the potential to hugely profit its owners and also lay waste to entire communities. Clint steals its formula and forms a tentative alliance with Kevin and other unsavory men, while Big Sandy is sent to steal it back. The book flaunts the grim panache of a London crime saga, and all the characters are engaging, no matter how despicable they are. But its world can also be hyperbolically awful, as when Kevin demands to watch men have sex with his sister or when Gawl McCaskey, a psychopathic thug, impulsively slashes the arm of a random stranger; even the priest, Father Sebastian, has unspeakable sexual appetites. The dialogue is full of macho declarations, as when a mobster threatens a captured drug dealer: “If you tell me where the money is and what happened to the formula, I’ll shoot you through the skull….Otherwise…you’ll squirm for hours in the kind of agony no human can dream about until they’re subjected to it. Your call.” As exploitative as Dash’s characters are, though, he provides plenty of back story to justify their actions and attitudes. In the end, the author seems to delight in punishing his protagonists for their sins by shooting, strangling, and battering the life out of them. As a result, for the first 400 pages or so, the story occupies a moral gray area, but in the final chapters, there’s no question who’s evil and who’s pure.
Not for the faint of heart, but this novel’s character studies and ever shifting plot will excite fans of English noir.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5077-3719-4
Page Count: 714
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
© Copyright 2024 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.
