The bleak, powerful fadeout reserves resolution mostly for the dead; the living will clearly have to take their chances in...
It’s official: Pelecanos’s latest dispatch from the trenches of the nation’s capital shows his prodigious ambition overflowing the bounds of one novel into a torrential epic of cops and robbers.
As druglord Granville Oliver awaits trial for the crimes against humanity he committed in Pelecanos’s last round (Hell to Pay, 2002), Derek Strange, the private eye working for his lawyer, gets the idea of discrediting Philip Wood, the Judas lieutenant who’s testifying against him, by deposing Wood’s ex-girlfriend, hairdresser Devra Stokes, who filed a brutality complaint against him but then didn’t press charges. Meantime, Strange’s partner, Irish ex-cop Terry Quinn, is looking for Olivia Elliot, the missing girlfriend of Mario Durham, a criminal so ineffectual that he’s completely under the thumb of his kid brother Dewayne, head of the notorious Six-hundred Crew in Washington Highlands. Terry doesn’t believe Mario’s hearts-and-flowers tale about Olivia, who’s actually split with his drugs, but he does believe his $100, and in no time at all he finds her, with unhappy results for all. More complications pop up like ducks in a shooting gallery—Terry’s girlfriend, shamus Sue Terry, seeks Linda Welles, still another missing teenager; rival dealer Horace McKinley decides to move in on Dewayne’s turf; gun seller Ulysses Foreman finds to his dismay that the gun he’d rented out for only a few days has been linked to two homicides; Strange meets Nick Stefanos, the p.i. from Pelecanos’s earlier books (Shame the Devil, 2000, etc.)—but individual plots and people must struggle to assert themselves against the duck-and-cover hell that Strange, who can’t believe his luck in having a stable household to go home to, finds around every street corner in contemporary D.C.
The bleak, powerful fadeout reserves resolution mostly for the dead; the living will clearly have to take their chances in whatever blistering sequel their talented creator has planned.Pub Date: March 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-60843-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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