An entertaining suspense tale that plays celebrity mythology against reality in intriguing ways.
Rocker Lou Reed emerges from the doldrums by investigating a killing that may implicate Andy Warhol’s Factory scene in this mordant murder mystery.
Gomez spins his novel around a real-life low point in the rock god’s career after he quit the Velvet Underground in 1970. Reed worked as a typist for $40 a week at his dad Sidney’s accounting firm on Long Island, an unfathomable plunge into banality from the musician’s former place in the glam Manhattan demimonde swirling around his mentor Andy Warhol. In this mystery, Lou discovers that Sidney is paying to store the possessions, including a Warhol painting, of one Samuel Donato, who was shot to death in 1967. Looking into the incident, Lou learns from Warhol and Factory regulars that he knew Donato even though he has no recollection of it, a common occurrence ever since electroshock treatments in college impaired his memory. Lou is stonewalled by Sidney, and everyone else and gets a beating from a man who’s trying to steal the valuable painting. But the rocker unearths evidence that Donato was pitching a murder-for-art’s-sake scheme to Warhol and may have been killed for it by Lou himself. Much of the fun of Gomez’s tale is the spectacle of Lou, patron saint of wildness, deviancy, and heroin, marooned in his childhood bedroom, seething at Sidney’s lectures and festering in suburbia—“Nothing but car dealerships and department stores. Gas stations and muffler shops. Flat mediocrity everywhere he looks”—after his formation in the crucible of the Factory. (“Drag queens, drugs, cameras filming every moment and Andy, always in the background, making things….Everyone was either creative or crazy and, after you’ve been up for three days on speed, you really couldn’t tell the difference.”) The author’s sly, deadpan prose captures both settings and their denizens in wonderfully evocative detail, especially Warhol’s blend of cool and crass. (“Did you see the retrospective in Pasadena?...It was fabulous. A soup can sold the next day for sixty thousand. Can you believe it?”) As Lou unravels the darker threads of his past, the war for his soul takes surprising and resonant twists. The result is a page-turner that will make Reed’s fans think again about his character.
An entertaining suspense tale that plays celebrity mythology against reality in intriguing ways.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 165
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.
An aspiring mystery writer sets out to solve her great-aunt’s murder and inherit an estate.
Twenty-five-year-old Annie Adams has never met her great-aunt Frances, who prefers her small village to busy London. But when a mysterious letter arrives instructing Annie to come to Castle Knoll in Dorset to meet Frances and discuss her role as sole beneficiary of her great-aunt’s estate, Annie can’t resist. Unfortunately, she arrives to find Frances’ worst fears have come true: The elderly woman—who’s been haunted for decades by a fortuneteller’s prediction that this will happen—has been murdered, and her will dictates that she will leave her entire estate to Annie, but only if Annie solves her killing. It’s a cheeky if not exactly believable premise, especially since the local police don’t seem terribly opposed to it. Annie herself is an engaging presence, if a little too blind to the fact that she could be on the killer’s to-do list. Her roll call of suspects is pleasingly long, including but not limited to the local vicar, a one-time paramour of her great-aunt’s; a gardener who grows a lot more than flowers; shady developers and suspicious friends from Frances’ past; and Saxon, Annie’s crafty rival, who inherits the estate himself if he manages to solve the case first. Annie pieces together clues through readings of Frances’ journal, but the story eventually runs aground on the twin rocks of too much explanation and a flimsy climax. Cute dialogue gives way to lengthy exposition, and by the time Frances’ killer is revealed you may well be ready to leave Annie, Dorset, and Castle Knoll behind for the firmer ground of reality. Fans of cozy mysteries are likely to be more forgiving, but if you cast a skeptical eye toward amateur sleuths, this novel won’t change your mind about them.
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593474013
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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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