Intricate and fascinating. Heartless Columbus offers cold comfort on dark nights.
Haas (The Silver Bear, 2008, etc.) brings his cold, canny professional hit man back in this cold, canny thriller.
The author opens with his lethally efficient Columbus, aka the Silver Bear, secluded in an Italian seaside village, hoping to retire from his lucrative work as a hired killer. Risina, his lover, who knows how to cook as well as kill, has “shown him what life could be without a Glock.” Of course, in the thriller genre, a killer's retirement means that another bloody junket awaits. And indeed, on a visit to a nearby city, Columbus confronts a man who had been following him. The man, Smoke, hands Columbus a note: “Bring Columbus home,” it demands. “Or you’ll get Grant back in a way you won’t like.” This threat against Grant, the Bear's boss, sends Columbus into a maze of fast kills and treachery. At his side follows Risina, insisting she can learn to kill as ruthlessly and remorselessly as Columbus. Her subsequent trial by blood and terror largely defines her, an aspect some readers will find thin, if not objectionable, characterization. Following a trail that leads to Chicago, Kansas City and Connecticut—and to a man who uses skulls as bargaining chips—Columbus demonstrates his deadly touch, his asides to Risina and to himself constituting a primer on how to excel at the fast kill. He’s particularly masterful at ferreting out wedges that get people to worm on their associates. In one of the book’s more affecting passages, he strong-arms a woman to recall her life with a man she never suspected was a pro killer. When a falling scaffolding takes Smoke’s life, Columbus knows the collapse was not an accident. Connecting clues from the accident and from the woman’s narrative, he realizes he faces “dark men,” a particular kind of foe he’s not used to fighting.
Intricate and fascinating. Heartless Columbus offers cold comfort on dark nights.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60598-271-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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
With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it’s almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.
A young Philadelphia policewoman searches for her addicted sister on the streets.
The title of Moore’s (The Unseen World, 2016, etc.) fourth novel refers to “a long bright river of departed souls,” the souls of people dead from opioid overdoses in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington. The book opens with a long paragraph that's just a list of names, most of whom don’t have a role in the plot, but the last two entries are key: “Our mother. Our father.” As the novel opens, narrator Mickey Fitzpatrick—a bright but emotionally damaged single mom—is responding with her partner to a call. A dead girl has turned up in an abandoned train yard frequented by junkies. Mickey is terrified that it will be her estranged sister, Kacey, whom she hasn’t seen in a while. The two were raised by their grandmother, a cold, bitter woman who never recovered from the overdose death of the girls' mother. Mickey herself is awkward and tense in all social situations; when she talks about her childhood she mentions watching the other kids from the window, trying to memorize their mannerisms so she could “steal them and use them [her]self.” She is close with no one except her 4-year-old son, Thomas, whom she barely sees because she works so much, leaving him with an unenthusiastic babysitter. Opioid abuse per se is not the focus of the action—the book centers on the search for Kacey. Obsessed with the possibility that her sister will end up dead before she can find her, Mickey breaches protocol and makes a series of impulsive decisions that get her in trouble. The pace is frustratingly slow for most of the book, then picks up with a flurry of revelations and developments toward the end, bringing characters onstage we don’t have enough time to get to know. The narrator of this atmospheric crime novel has every reason to be difficult and guarded, but the reader may find her no easier to bond with than the other characters do.
With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it’s almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-54067-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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