Bogosian’s determined love for the banal, rickety cultural attitudes and artifacts he’s sending up places this despairing,...
Just another violent, surrealistic day at the most American locale of all, courtesy of the celebrated actor and performance artist’s first novel.
Danny is a suburban husband and father whose wife seems so contented and complete without sex that his doctor has prescribed a course of masturbation. Donna is a hot fox whose boring husband doesn’t appreciate what a sensuous woman she is. Jeff is a teenaged mall rat who just wants the security guys to leave him alone to ponder the state of contemporary culture, the fate of the earth, and his next shot at getting high. Michel is a widowed Haitian security guard who patrols the mall with all the devotion he used to give his late wife. Barry rents tuxes. None of these people has the slightest inkling of how unexpectedly their lives will be changed by Mal, a misfit pumped up on crystal meth who’s killed his mother, set his house afire, armed himself to the teeth, and headed to the mall to settle an old score. And neither will most readers, since Bogosian delights in setting up carefully orchestrated meetings, conversions, and payoffs—needy voyeur meets equally needy exhibitionist, demented killer is stalked by avenger with a single bullet—and then giving the table another shake, sending the balls scattering in alarmingly new patterns. It’s in the nature of this exercise in cosmic non sequitur that it culminates in an absurdist apotheosis rather than a conclusion. But where else are you going to find pleasures like a sex scene that leaves its principal feeling “like a blissed-out, slightly stunned tuna”?
Bogosian’s determined love for the banal, rickety cultural attitudes and artifacts he’s sending up places this despairing, funny debut in the vast sea of satire somewhere between Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Carl Hiaasen’s school of South Florida crazies.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-85727-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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