A fun and captivating historical noir.
In this novel, a private investigator stumbles on a large conspiracy when a real estate developer starts snatching up land in 1950s San Francisco.
In 1957, Katsuhiro “Kats” Takemoto is watching Alfred Hitchcock direct the film Vertigo. Kats was brought in to help James Stewart prepare for the role of a San Francisco private detective and then was retained by the studio (“Stewart needed security and a driver while he was in town and said he wanted Kats”). After the movie wraps, Kats goes back to his job as a private eye, taking the case of a man named Anton Vello, who is trying to save his family business from unscrupulous developers. The goal of the developers seems to be to buy land for a new baseball stadium for the Giants. But as Kats investigates, he quickly sees that something fishy is going on with the people who are trying to drive out Anton’s family and others in the mostly immigrant community. A secretary named Molly Hayes, who works for the developers, finds their actions morally dubious and agrees to help Kats. Kats is juggling a few other cases, and his path keeps crossing with Molly’s, leading them to grow closer. Also in the mix is Kats’ friend Shig Murao, who manages the City Lights bookstore. As Kats continues to investigate, it becomes clear that there’s a much bigger conspiracy at work, and the culprits aren’t above using violence to get their way. Kageyama’s novel offers a bracing look at postwar San Francisco. Kats is still dealing with the fallout of World War II, during which his family surrendered much of its property and he served in the Army. Many of the characters are first-generation Americans, and a recurring theme focuses on immigrant identities. The story, which blends historical fiction and noir, is well researched, with a lot of intriguing period details about San Francisco. Readers who adore immersive settings will find plenty to love here. There are also some striking cameos, from luminaries like Stewart and Allen Ginsberg to such lesser-known figures as blues singer Gladys Bentley.
A fun and captivating historical noir.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-940300-63-4
Page Count: 364
Publisher: St. Petersburg Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
Fascinating main characters and a clever plot add up to an exciting read.
A thriller with bloody murders and plenty of suspects and featuring an unlikely partnership between two FBI investigators.
FBI consultant Amos Decker has a lot on his mind. The huge fellow once played for the Cleveland Browns in the NFL until he received a catastrophic brain injury, leaving him with synesthesia; he sees death as electric blue. More pertinent to the plot, he also has hyperthymesia, or spontaneous and highly accurate recall. On the one hand, his memories can be horrible. He’d once come home to find his wife and daughter murdered, dead in pools of blood. Later, he listens helplessly on the telephone while his ex-partner shoots herself in the mouth. On the other hand, his memory helps him solve every case he's given. Now he's sent to Florida with a brand-new partner, Special Agent Frederica White, to investigate the murder of a federal judge. Both partners are pissed at their last-minute pairing, and they immediately see themselves as a bad fit. White is a diminutive Black single mother of two who has a double black belt in karate “because I hate getting my ass kicked.” (The author doesn't mention Decker's race, but since he's being contrasted with his new partner in every way, perhaps readers are expected to see him as White. Clarity would be nice.) Their case is strange: Judge Julia Cummins was stabbed 10 times and her face covered with a mask, while her bodyguard was shot to death. Decker and White puzzle over the “very contrarian crime scene” where two murders seem to have been committed by two different people in the same place. The plot gets complex, with suspects galore. But the interpersonal dynamic between Decker and White is just as interesting as the solution to the murders, which doesn't come easily. At first, they’d like to be done with each other and go their separate ways. But as they work together, their mutual respect rises and—alas—the tension between them fades almost completely. The pair will make a great series duo, especially if a bit of that initial tension between them returns. And Baldacci shouldn’t give Decker a pass on his tortured memories, because readers enjoy suffering heroes. It's not enough that his near-perfect recall helps him in his job.
Fascinating main characters and a clever plot add up to an exciting read.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1982-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
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