Entertaining Mafia reprise, written by the pseudonymous Girard while serving a seven-year prison sentence for racketeering. Like Girard, his hero Mickey Boy Messina is out on parole after servingin Mickey's casesix years. Prison has not dimmed Mickey's ardor to be a made man in the Mafia. But then the blood of his Sicilian fathers runs deep in Mickey, who does not know that he's the illegitimate son of top boss Don Vicenze Calabra. Don Vicenze himself has a dream: to condense the five Mafia families into two and make the ``blood of our fathers'' strong again. Unfortunately, this calls for much mayhem as big-time mafiosi and their underbosses, captains, soldiers and associates are shipped to the next world by way of a huge wave of assassinations and reprisals. Mickey Boy's problems are with his smart, sexy girlfriend Laurel and seem much like Michael Corleone's with Kay: Laurel doesn't want Mickey as long as he remains in the mob. She's eyeing Florida and a fresh start. Mickey's problems are doubled by his half-brother Little Vinnie Calabra, a slobbering wimp with delusions of grandeur, who knows that Don Vincenze is secretly grooming Mickey to be top boss, although Mickey doesn't know this, or that Vinnie's his half- brother. Vinniewho has the hots for Laurelhas made three failed his on Mickey; in fact, it was Vinnie who first noted a certain look-alike quality with Mickey and had him set up to take the fall for himself: Mickey did six years for Vinniebut also for Don Vicenze. Meanwhile, Mickey's widowed mother Connie is back in town and crossing paths with her old lover Don Vicenze, himself now a widower. As the lead flies, both Connie and Don Vincenze try to convince Laurel that life with her beloved Mickey will be okay because the Family is going legit and getting out of the rackets. This long first installmenta sequel is underwayends with Mickey assuming top spot. Strong storytelling that lacks the originality of The Godfather but has many writerly touches and a wonderful bloom of authenticity.
Pub Date: June 4, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-72740-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
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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