A kinky jeremiad about drug culture burnout (and fallout), powered by amusingly feverish images of California-as-Armageddon, from the poet and author whose recent fiction includes Jesus' Son (1992) and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (1991). Johnson's latest is composed of a series of linked narratives set along the northern California coast in 199091, and centered in the psychic unraveling of Nelson Fairchild, a 30ish rich boy marijuana-grower who has unwisely cheated a murderous colleague, and spends his generally stoned, panicked days simultaneously fleeing the hit men who pursue him and arranging his own hit on his wife (who controls their finances, and in any case has been supplanted in Nelson's lustful affections by his mistress Melissa). Johnson surrounds Nelson's ordeal with a garish jumble of variously related outlaws and misfits, including Carl Van Ness, a philosophical drifter who vacillates between the consolations promised by suicide (Johnson's title denotes Van Ness's passive mind-set) and the intriguing prospect of becoming Nelson's hired gun; Wilhelm Frankheimer, a gigantic acidhead merchant marine turned blacksmith; Nelson's gently delirious brother William, who lives in the woods and writes deranged letters filled with cosmic paranoia to the police; a cop named Navarro who's drawn into their increasingly bizarre dance of death; and several alternately lissome and lethal women who, when not fulfilling their men's erotic fantasies, are blithely double-crossing them. There's also an effective Grand Guignol appearance by Nelson Fairchild päre, the kind of venomous old man whom John Huston always played in movies. The book does move right along, despite its bulk, and the writing is frequently charged with energy and wit. But it contains a little too much of everything: fashionable despair (though Nelson's imagined ``demon'' has a gritty surrealism), New Age meandering, and fitful little explosions of overcalculated violence. A novel this one resembles, Charlie Smith's The Lives of the Dead, did it better. Johnson's attempt at a noir epic intermittently excites and teases, but doesn't satisfy.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-018737-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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