A wonderfully written thriller with Big Sky country as a setting.
Montana Voice podcast host Saroff debuts with a novel about an enigmatic loner who attracts strange characters as he tries to do good—or repair the bad he has done.
Enzi is much like Saroff: a runaway and a dyslexic who started with nothing. But he discovers a talent for—and a fascination with—math and winds up a successful computer coder with his own company. But he has come under the sway of Tommy Tsai, a very smooth and very, very bad guy, and gets drawn into cybercrime. At the same time, he posts bail for, and falls half in love with, a young woman named Kaori, an unbalanced Japanese artist prone to not just violent mood swings, but violence itself. Halfway through the novel, the Kaori story takes a back seat to Enzi’s desperate fight to break Tsai’s hold over him. It’s unwise to try to walk away from Tommy Tsai, who has murderous contacts, and true to thriller conventions, the plot involves a race against time. The story is set in Montana (mostly Missoula), and Enzi can wax eloquent about the surrounding mountains and streams. That’s one way his tale has something of the spirit of Hemingway stories like “Up in Michigan.” Another is that his spare—for the most part—prose seems designed to step out of the way but is arresting in itself. But Saroff is also capable of lyric flights and striking metaphors, referring in one passage to “the self-created legal clockwork of his [father’s] ruin.” One of Enzi’s allies is a bail bondsman named Pascal Ameto, a source of practical wisdom who is very like Enzi in his manner and a true friend in a strange way, who addresses Enzi simply as “a Fella” (“A Fella should probably have a drink with me later”). And Pascal has his own interesting stories to tell. It’s no spoiler to say that by the end, Enzi is on his own in the desert, starting over or that that’s the story of his life.
A wonderfully written thriller with Big Sky country as a setting.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2022
ISBN: 979-8985703832
Page Count: 205
Publisher: Flooding Island
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.
The feds must protect an accused criminal and an orphaned girl.
Maybe you’ve met him before as protagonist of The 6:20 Man (2022): Ex-Army Ranger Travis Devine, who’d had the dubious fortune to tangle with “the girl on the train,” is now assigned by his homeland security boss to protect Danny Glass, who's awaiting trial on multiple RICO charges in Washington state. Devine has what it takes: He “was a closer, snooper, fixer, investigator,” and, when necessary, a killer. These skills are on full display as the deaths of three key witnesses grind justice to a temporary halt. Glass has a 12-year-old niece, Betsy Odom, and each is the other’s only living relative—her parents recently died of an apparent drug overdose. The FBI has temporary guardianship of Betsy, who's a handful. She tells Travis that though she’s not yet 13, she's 28 in “life-shit years.” The financially well-heeled Glass wants to be her legal guardian with an eye to eventual adoption, but what are his real motives? And what happens to her if he's convicted? Meanwhile, Betsy insists that her parents never touched drugs, and she begs Travis to find out how they really died. This becomes part of a mission that oozes danger. The small town of Ricketts has a woman mayor who’s full of charm on the surface, but deeply corrupt and deadly when crossed. She may be linked to a subversive group called "12/24/65," as in 1865, when the Ku Klux Klan beast was born. Blood flows, bombs explode, and people perish, both good guys and not-so-good guys. Readers might ponder why in fiction as well as in life, it sometimes seems necessary for many to die so one may live. And what about the girl on the train? She's not necessary to the plot, but she's a fun addition as she pops in and out of the pages, occasionally leaving notes for Travis. Maybe she still wants him dead.
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781538757901
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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