The major lesson learned here is that Begley's crime series has run its course and was an ill-advised detour from its...
Hard-boiled meets high society in a novel of unspeakable horror among the unspeakably wealthy.
In the third (Kill and Be Killed, 2016, etc.) in a series of thrillers featuring Jack Dana—Marine hero–turned–bestselling novelist with a sideline of fighting high-level corruption—Begley continues to fall short of the incisive craftsmanship that earned him acclaim with more-literary novels such as About Schmidt (1996). Having dispensed with an evil nemesis at the end of Volume 2, Begley doesn’t even bother with a plausible successor or much of a plot. Instead, this is more of a wildly implausible addendum to the last novel, one in which Dana rationally realizes that “dead men don’t send messages or stage macabre Punch-and-Judy shows,” but he nevertheless finds himself enveloped within a scenario that seems masterminded from the grave. For those who missed the first two installments, the author provides recaps of every significant plot point while reintroducing stock characters such as the Asian manservant Feng, a “former member of the Hong Kong Police Force Special Duty Unit,” who would lay down his life for his boss and who is also a gourmet cook who makes a mean martini and is “the picture of Asiatic propriety.” Jack’s girlfriend is the international-lawyer daughter of a billionaire tycoon, not much interested in men until the comfort she found in Jack’s cuddling led to more. A household massacre that reminds everyone of Charles Manson, only worse, proceeds to extortion plots and kidnapping, all apparently designed to flush Jack from his lair of safety. But for what reason? To what end? Jack determines that it is he who will flush them out: “If these people want to have a go at me, let them. I may be able to teach them a lesson.”
The major lesson learned here is that Begley's crime series has run its course and was an ill-advised detour from its inception.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54494-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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