Koch is consistently attuned to our hidden foibles and fakery, which makes for deliberately discomfiting reading. Sleeker...
A man contemplates getting back at the novelist who exploited his life in fiction.
Koch’s third novel translated into English (Summer House with Swimming Pool, 2015, etc.) is partly a satire of the petty grievances of the literary world, partly a vision of sociopathic cruelty, though ultimately a little too much of both. The “Mr. M” of the title has had a long career writing novels that have garnered heaps of acclaim but modest sales—with the exception of Payback, his bestselling fictionalization of a much-discussed news story about a pair of teens who were accused of killing a teacher who’d had an affair with one of them. Herman, one of the students allegedly involved, hasn’t been able to let go of the experience decades later; indeed, he lives in the same building as the writer, and as M makes the publicity rounds for a new novel, Herman is increasingly invasive of his personal space, stalking his wife and posing as a journalist to ask some pointed questions of him. Koch (via Garrett’s translation) does a fine job of capturing Herman’s arrogant, narcissistic swagger (“I have certain plans for you…”; “Who are you trying to impress…?”), but he wisely pivots away from Herman’s narration to include multiple perspectives—Mr. M, the troubled teacher, and the classmates who witnessed Herman’s high school antics. (He enjoyed taunting a classmate whose mother was dying, for instance.) Koch suggests that in some ways Herman and M are similar—both exploit others’ pasts, have mean streaks (M fantasizes about mass-murdering his readers), and have troubled pasts to cover up. But that argument isn’t wholly persuasive—Herman’s adolescence was crueler—and the layering of Herman’s back story overwhelms the core mystery story of what truly happened with that teacher.
Koch is consistently attuned to our hidden foibles and fakery, which makes for deliberately discomfiting reading. Sleeker writing would enhance its impact.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90332-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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
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