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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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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