An entertaining detective story set in the gritty Chicago underworld.
Musial (Hit Out, 2016, etc.) returns to the adventures of Max Deacon, pool hall private eye, in his latest crime novel.
Army veteran Max enjoys his life, such as it is: working his shifts at the Chicago pool hall owned by his friend Dougie, sparring with his buddy Moose Delavan in mixed martial arts, and spending his money on his customized Mustang GT. Max is always happy to help out the people he respects, like his colleague Sharon Petra, a single mother who holds two jobs to support her daughter, Selina. When Sharon asks Max to accompany her to a mysterious meeting—“You don’t have to do anything…I hope,” she tells him. “Just look menacing”—he goes along without complaint, even though he’s pretty sure she’s requesting a loan from some Czech gangsters. The next night, he finds out she’s been arrested for a triple murder. The prostitution kingpin whom Sharon met with was killed later that same day along with two of his associates, and she is the primary suspect in the crime. Sharon refuses to cooperate with the investigation or tell Max anything other than that she was trying to help her half sister. With the assistance of his brother Stan, a cop, Max takes it upon himself to clear Sharon’s name and get to the bottom of what is quickly becoming a deadly struggle among the roughest members of the Chicago underworld. Musial writes in a sharp, moody prose that is slightly too jocular to be truly noir: “Red and I played on and off, but always on Sunday nights. It wasn’t because he was a wonderful conversationalist; he was a conspiracy theorist who never shut up.” Despite his generic tough-guy flourishes—the Mustang, the pool, the whiskey, the physical prowess—Max is an oddly endearing hero whom readers genuinely root for. The plot in this installment isn’t terribly intricate or surprising—an old Army buddy’s reappearance plays out just as readers would expect—but the cast of lovable lowlifes who compose Max’s circle is enjoyable enough to keep audiences engaged. Hopefully, Musial will continue to deliver Max Deacon books for years to come.
An entertaining detective story set in the gritty Chicago underworld.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 218
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2017
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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