The authors hit this one out of the park; a highly recommended mystery.
In this debut Chicago-set crime novel, police nickname a brutal serial killer Slugger because he beats his victims with a “bat-like weapon” and leaves a folded, collectible baseball card.
Slugger preys on hookers on the South Side of the city. Detective Kyle McNally and his longtime partner, Sam Weller, investigate the third murdered woman found in Canarytown, “the tavern district of south-central Chicago.” Looking for a lead, Kyle reaches out to informant Eddie Caffey, who “could smell a U.S. Grant from a block away.” But Eddie’s now skittish to talk because he says he saw another informant take a bullet to the head by a dirty cop whose identity isn’t clear. Splotchy-faced Cmdr. Alfred “Al” Rouse, with a broad nose featuring “a small vertical cleft that reminded Kyle of a miniature woman’s ass,” pressures the detective to solve the serial killer case. When another mangled corpse is found, Kyle visits the morgue to talk to the stone-faced but shapely legged county medical examiner, Dr. Mykel Hartley, about the time of death and the mutilation of the body. If it’s the same murderer, he broke from his modus operandi in several ways, including placing the victim in a cemetery far from Canarytown. Detective Liz Dumont—a petite, dedicated “dynamo” who’s “easy on the eyes, too”—mulls if there could be a copycat killer. McCullough and Boydston get a lot of credit for not portraying Kyle as the flawless hunk on the force. Although described as handsome, with a “body that looked well-tended,” he can be impatient and short-tempered. The divorced bourbon drinker doesn’t look for love, but it’s enjoyable—and not overdone—when he finds it. More sensitive readers may balk at the descriptions of mutilated bodies. But fans of gritty crime stories and methodical police work will find the book a page-turner, complete with notable characters, dialogue, and descriptions (“He guessed her at six foot two and skinny as a Ball Park frank”). Names and depictions of Chicago attractions and streets are accurate, with the exception that Canarytown is most likely a stand-in for Canaryville, a community on the city’s South Side that was originally a largely Irish neighborhood.
The authors hit this one out of the park; a highly recommended mystery.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 14, 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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