Both sides of the race issue get a fair hearing in this well-executed tale.
A psychological novel focuses on issues of race, personal responsibility, and privilege at a California liberal arts college.
College student Evelyn Davis is dealing with a stalker. Trouble is, no seems to know what to do about him. Eddie Pike, an Afghanistan War veteran, is an older White student. He maintains he means Evelyn no harm, but it’s obvious his personal problems exceed the services that the college’s counseling clinic offers. A sophisticated African American woman, Evelyn knows how to navigate both the Black and White worlds, “having been brought up in a well-to-do white neighborhood.” Professor Billie Ochoa teaches a class Eddie and Evelyn share. Billie is enamored of her Cuban heritage and Fidel Castro’s island paradise. As a conscientious educator, she tutors Eddie alone so he can continue with the class while Evelyn stays safe. But the unwanted intrusions mount, from Eddie’s following Evelyn to his sneaking into her apartment. Campus police tiptoe around the problem because they say they can’t prove Eddie committed a crime. Evelyn is leery of the authorities, and soon the issues of race and administrative action boil over. Billie is exasperated, venting to a college official: “A young African-American woman who’s being stalked? Doesn’t that distress you? Just a bit? That it’s the white men you’re always protecting?” The administration reaches out to Eddie, but when a restraining order is issued, word gets out that he is a stalker, and he becomes the object of student protests. In this engaging tale, Axelroth is fair to all the characters and allows Evelyn and others to see both sides of the complicated race issue. At times, Evelyn feels discomfort at being “a stand-in for whatever Black people thought—about police shooting unarmed Black men, and looting in Black neighborhoods, and isn’t affirmative action just reverse discrimination?” Personal responsibility becomes an issue when Billie lies and tells the authorities Eddie threatened Evelyn and when an administration member attempts to use the tumultuous campus situation to benefit her own agenda. This is set against secondary themes of the Cuban revolution, communism, and how sometimes the ends justify the means, which all get a rousing pro and con analysis in an academic hothouse of impassioned young thinkers.
Both sides of the race issue get a fair hearing in this well-executed tale.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-79481-618-3
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Lulu.com
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.
A much-beloved author gives a favorite recurring character her own novel.
Holly Gibney made her first appearance in print with a small role in Mr. Mercedes (2014). She played a larger role in The Outsider (2018). And she was the central character in If It Bleeds, a novella in the 2020 collection of the same name. King has said that the character “stole his heart.” Readers adore her, too. One way to look at this book is as several hundred pages of fan service. King offers a lot of callbacks to these earlier works that are undoubtedly a treat for his most loyal devotees. That these easter eggs are meaningless and even befuddling to new readers might make sense in terms of costs and benefits. King isn’t exactly an author desperate to grow his audience; pleasing the people who keep him at the top of the bestseller lists is probably a smart strategy, and this writer achieved the kind of status that whatever he writes is going to be published. Having said all that, it’s possible that even his hardcore fans might find this story a bit slow. There are also issues in terms of style. Much of the language King uses and the cultural references he drops feel a bit creaky. The word slacks occurs with distracting frequency. King uses the phrase keeping it on the down-low in a way that suggests he probably doesn’t understand how this phrase is currently used—and has been used for quite a while. But the biggest problem is that this narrative is framed as a mystery without delivering the pleasures of a mystery. The reader knows who the bad guys are from the start. This can be an effective storytelling device, but in this case, waiting for the private investigator heroine to get to where the reader is at the beginning of the story feels interminable.
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016138
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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