An often entertaining caper that mixes high art and low criminality.
Three young would-be art forgers get in over their heads in this debut crime novel.
In 1990 Toronto, 20-year-old art student Marty Ronan is roommates with Howie Harrington, a transplanted British DJ who lives off the wealth of his investment banker father. The two men, along with Marty’s shady childhood friend Matt Babcock, throw illegal parties and make a decent amount of cash doing it. Then, one morning, a hungover Marty reads about the astronomical price tag of a Van Gogh painting in the New York Times and comes up with an idea: What if he and his friends forged a stolen painting and sold it on the black market? “It’s as much about choosing the right pigeon as it is about producing a passable forgery,” Marty explains to the others. “We don’t explain how we got it. We don’t have to. We present it as a stolen work of art to a dealer or collector willing to buy it anyway.” While scanning recent issues of a magazine dedicated to art thefts, Marty comes across the perfect piece to fake—a large-scale pastel drawing by Pablo Picasso that was stolen 16 years earlier and has yet to resurface. Through Howie, they find a suitable mark in a New York City investment banker who seems like he might be willing to purchase a hot artwork. Things get complicated, however, when Marty and Matt reconnect with Hamilton, Ontario–based gangsters. Marty’s father had previous run numbers for a man named Frank Piccolo, and Matt’s father, one of Frank’s enforcers, was murdered when Matt was only 15. But Matt and Marty will have to learn to keep old emotions at bay in order to pull off a $2.4 million deal. Kelly’s prose is full of detail and personality, and he keenly captures the attitude of his slacker criminal mastermind Marty. For example, as the artist begins his forgery, he narrates, “There was a lot I didn’t know...but if I waited until I felt I knew everything I knew I’d never start. And besides, if I couldn’t hack the pastels it wouldn’t matter if I knew everything there was to know or not.” That said, Marty and his friends often feel more like characters in a heist-movie screenplay than criminals that one might read about in the pages of a newspaper—they spend their days watching Martin Scorsese movies and their nights playing with guns and beautiful women. However, their milieu is specific and unusual enough to hold the reader’s interest. The author sometimes seems to get a bit too distracted by the minutiae of his settings—as when he spends a paragraph explaining exactly which streets the entrances to a college library face. Still, he manages to summon the environs of greater Toronto in a memorable manner. Nothing about this novel is terribly realistic, but it should satisfy readers for whom a clever criminal enterprise is just as impressive as a Picasso pastel.
An often entertaining caper that mixes high art and low criminality.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 295
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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