A world-weary spy who's been out of the business for nine years is dragged back into the circus to catch a former colleague gone rogue. At least that's the summary that'll end up on the dust jacket. But it doesn't give you any idea of the flip, absurdist tone—part Thomas Berger, part Richard Brautigan—that subverts the conventions of the spy novel even more profoundly than Sallis's earlier novels (Black Hornet, 1994, etc.) deconstructed the detective story. When former spy David (not his real name), dragged back into the game by his old boss Johnsson, now blind, bids farewell to his second life as a sculptor by telling his Irish-Mexican girlfriend Gabrielle that ``Everything you know about me, everything you think you know, is false'' and asking her to move far away from him, her unquestioning cooperation gives the tale a dreamlike unreality from the start. As the plot thickens, Sallis spins out all the obligatory scenes—the tense reunion with the agency types, the ritual stalkings, the bouts of Gabrielle-free sex, the long-anticipated kidnapping, the climactic showdown with the obsolete killer Luc Planchat—but in prose whose telegraphic flights of noblesse oblige (``Finally I did manage to drop him without getting hurt myself or, more important, without having to kill or seriously maim my opponent, but it wasn't easy'') are guaranteed to keep readers from losing any sleep over the story. The characters David meets in his cross-country odyssey are properly memorable—from his old agency friend Blaise, now mute, to Jeanne, the Piltdown guitarist who fears that sex has reactivated her cancer—but at the same time they come across as wayward squiggles whose interactions with David are so elusive that you'd be hard-pressed to take a quiz on the plot five minutes after turning the last page. The reward for patient readers is a finely poetic quality to every understated scene—despite a cargo of allusions to Voznesensky, Cendrars, Pavese, Cavafy, MacLeish, Apollinaire, and Homer.
Pub Date: July 11, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15513-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
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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