A post–baby-boomer thriller ripped from the headlines, with a minimum of liberal hand-wringing; bonus points for cops...
A low-key tale of street-level radicalism that melds contemporary social consciousness with middle-age introspection.
After his impoverished father survives a debilitating stroke, Nick, a 40-something former journalist, returns home to Boston from California and wallows in inertia. When not negotiating the grim surrealism of his father’s condition, Nick mitigates the fallout of his stalled career and failed marriage by watching old movies, getting soused in bars and moshing at all-ages punk shows with Bo, the spunky teenage son of his old pal Lin, a nurse. A politically charged workers’ strike seems to set off a chain of criminal events—a brutal home invasion, beatings, suspicious accidents, escalating Occupy-style protests, and other messier, increasingly violent acts. Nick finds himself in the thick of it. But is it all really connected? And who should be held accountable: the greedy corporate concerns, the strikers and their union, or the fringe activist groups that flock to the escalating conflict? Nick revives his rusty investigative skills in search of answers, eventually rebooting both his career and self-esteem. But, as the tension mounts, he questions his own ethical stance at every turn: “I don’t trust certainty,” he says. “Too much ugly shit happens in its name.” This self-deprecating, often funny first-person account of an increasingly dangerous adventure is provocative and utterly believable; to the author’s credit—despite all the references to the Dropkick Murphys and other local color—Nick never succumbs to the tiresome classist romanticism that usually colors Boston-based thrillers. By its end, the story is much more complex—and banal—than it first seemed, with Nick’s own noirish moral relativism at the heart. The almost upbeat ending (a second chance for a slightly disenchanted young activist, a possible romance for the now slightly less jaded newspaperman) will satisfy readers who prefer their mysteries finely constructed—though in light of the novel’s overall realism, that conclusion can feel a bit contrived.
A post–baby-boomer thriller ripped from the headlines, with a minimum of liberal hand-wringing; bonus points for cops without stereotypical accents.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1938692987
Page Count: 307
Publisher: Last Light Studio
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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