Bursting with vigor and electrified characters and with an ending the author stamps with a knowing wink.
A small group deals with the fallout of a California ski-resort town whose residents have mysteriously vanished in Perry’s (Eliot Ness: The Rise and Fall of an American Hero, 2015, etc.) thriller.
An earthquake in Mammoth View is just the beginning. Once the explosions hit, the town’s in a full-scale panic. Billy Lane and cohorts Jackson and Sam use these as diversions to rob the local bank, but a traffic jam impedes their getaway. They turn around and head up the mountain, passing through a summer running camp for girls. Billy’s teenage daughter Tori is there, but when she returns from a hot-spring dip, her fellow runners and coaches are gone. Back in Mammoth View, notorious hellion brothers Melvin and Gordon Johnson are taking advantage of the seemingly deserted town, grabbing food or whatever abandoned goods they can find. Police chief Kenneth Hicks believes the brothers are responsible for the bank robbery, not to mention the corresponding bodies. They’ve definitely kidnapped someone, as Hicks and Lt. Johnny Lloyd soon discover, and only get more desperate and dangerous when they realize the cops are after them. Tori and radio DJ Oscar Alphonse “King” Desario may be potential abductees, for leverage or something worse. The moody story benefits from its atmospheric setting. What exactly sparked an apparent evacuation, for example, isn’t fully revealed until the end. There are hints of possible causes—someone suggests a Russian invasion or perhaps aliens—all shrouded with an undercurrent of sheer creepiness, like an initially unexplained “blob” following girls at the camp. Solidly developed characters add to the tension, people either wanting to escape their past or hopelessly locked inside it. Billy, for one, longs for the days with Becky, his partner (now dead) in both crime and love and Tori’s mom, while King’s girlfriend, Janice, is itching to flee Mammoth View—and maybe the DJ as well. Various players cross paths in intriguing, sometimes amusing ways (Janice in nearby Stockton meets someone readers will recognize), and most find their ways, reluctantly or not, back to Mammoth View.
Bursting with vigor and electrified characters and with an ending the author stamps with a knowing wink.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9972377-1-9
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Amberjack Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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