The debut by one of the great American suspense writers will suck you in even as it makes you keep asking, "Did I just read...
A movie star–turned-designer gets swept into a murderous hunt for a precious gem in this reissued 1940s thriller.
Griselda Satterlee (not, thank God, her screen name) has decided to give up the screen for the comparatively quieter life of fashion design. During a trip to New York, which will reunite her with her two sisters and find her staying in her ex-husband's digs near Madison Avenue, Griselda returns home one night only to be accosted by the Montefierrow twins, denizens of the society page, back in town after a dozen years on the Continent, and as thoroughly, chillingly, cold-bloodedly homicidal a pair as has appeared in any thriller. The twins insist that Griselda's ex is in possession of a rare and ancient gem, which they call the blue marble, and insist she knows where it is. Her own insistence that she has no idea spurs the twins to a series of vicious murders, made even more horrible by the alternately gleeful and bored participation of Griselda's conscienceless, psychopathic younger sister. Some of the murders are committed to extract information and some just to tidy up loose ends. But as with everything else in the rather intricate plot, the particulars drop away and the motive, far more than obtaining the marble, becomes the desire for mayhem and casual sadism, all of it executed as casually as ordering another round. Nearly 80 years after its initial publication, there is still nothing like Hughes' (The Expendable Man, 1963, etc.) debut novel. The 1940s New York setting, the characters who drink like fish and dress for dinner and take cabs to go a block—because, really, who walks?—give the book the sophisticated luster of romantic comedy. But it's as if a Lubitsch movie kept being periodically taken over by David Lynch. It remains funny only now we're being asked to laugh at murder and threats and oddball sociopaths. And so the book becomes genuinely nightmarish, at times close to suffocating.
The debut by one of the great American suspense writers will suck you in even as it makes you keep asking, "Did I just read that?"Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61316-111-1
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Penzler Publishers
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
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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