A richly entertaining take on the crime story, and a country that might’ve been.
A brutal murder threatens to set off a race war in alternative-history Illinois.
In reality, Cahokia was an ancient Native American settlement across the Mississippi River from what’s now St. Louis. In Spufford’s cleverly conceived, well-made police procedural, it’s the hub of a thriving Native-led U.S. state in 1922. Native leadership there is stubbornly opposed by local whites, and the Klan is ascendant. So the murder of a white man on the roof of a downtown building, made to look like an Aztec sacrifice, is a powder keg. Was the killing committed by Natives pushing back against prejudice, or whites stirring tensions to stage a government overthrow? Joe Barrow, a Cahokia police detective investigating the case, is quickly enmeshed not just in the murder but in the politics of a city on edge. (A country, too: Mormons are agitating for their own state out west, and tensions have flared on the border of Alaska, still Russian territory.) Spufford has cleverly thought through all the Risk-board elements of this setup, from Cahokia’s industries, to the intersection of Native folkways and Catholicism, to the city’s various ethnic enclaves. (A lengthy afterword delivers a plausible case for its creation.) But at heart the novel is a straightforward, smart noir, with Joe torn among his police duties, his sideline as a talented piano player at a local club, an erratic white detective partner, a budding romance, and his own grim upbringing in an orphanage. The concept owes a debt to Michael Chabon’s 2007 counterfactual detective yarn, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, but Joe is an original invention, steeped in complex history—a “Mississippian fusion” of European, American, and Native ideas—and torn over what do for himself, his city, and his culture.
A richly entertaining take on the crime story, and a country that might’ve been.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781668025451
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.
Lt. Eve Dallas and her colleagues in the New York Police and Security Department step outside their comfort zone into counterterrorism.
Back in 2024, during the stressful time of the Urban Wars, a courageous band calling themselves The Twelve fought Dominion and other violent fringe groups that sought to end civilization as we know it, despite the presence of a traitor in their own midst. Now, 37 years later, someone’s killed Giovanni Rossi, a retired cybersecurity expert who was one of The Twelve, an hour or so after a summons—ostensibly from another veteran of the group—brought him from Rome to New York. On the body, officers called to the scene find a copy of Dallas’ business card that’s been embellished with a flamboyant threat to annihilate the seven surviving members of The Twelve. Obligingly inviting all seven to New York—a move you’d think would make it a lot easier for their nemesis to wipe them all out at once—Dallas soon forms a theory about the killer’s identity and sets a trap to draw him out. But her plan turns into a narrow miss, upping the stakes on both sides, for now the killer knows Dallas is on to him. It’s in the nature of the case that there’s less mystery and detection than usual in this long-running franchise—the biggest surprise turns out to be the connection between Dallas and her quarry—but the thrills keep on coming, and the final interrogation, though highly predictable in its broad outlines, is as satisfying as ever.
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370792
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
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