Eased out of the NYPD, lawyer/shamus Stone Barrington (New York Dead, 1991) is free to mix with an even sleazier crowd: a vicious pair of blackmailers and their equally slimy victims. Stone's client, gossip columnist Amanda Dart, has no rivals in dishing dirt on New York celebs until the faxes headed ``DIRT'' start to spew from her own machine. The faxes know about her cozy liaison with an out-of-town developer; they know who she had dinner with, and who each of her dinner guests is sleeping with; they know that she's hired Stone to stop the flow of faxes; and they gleefully predict that it won't do a bit of good. Meantime, DIRT is also being dished on American Infiltrator editor Allan Peebles, a cut below Amanda in class and courage; and DIRT is warming up for the coup de grÉce against a third target. Stone isn't taking all this unauthorized faxing lying down, of course; he's allowing Amanda to seduce him, putting the moves on aspiring journalist Arrington Carter, and even (in Woods's most hilariously gratuitous scene) getting naked with a suspect's sister. In between bouts, he's discovering a passel of wiretaps encumbering the privacy of himself and those who sign his paychecks, and sending a retired NYPD colleague out on a surveillance detail that'll end in the morgue. The first half of the novel, highlighted by the bevy of willing, well-toned women taking their turns at Stone's shrine, is confidently, even amusingly predictable. But once Amanda's publisher Dick Hickock, presumably impressed by Stone's flurry of activity, decides to hire him on his own hook, the case begins to fall apart, as Stone's clients begin to pull in contrary directions and finally take matters into their own vigorous, aimless hands. Unmoored from their formulaic roles, Woods's tawdry avengers don't have enough substance to go it on their own. Besides, it hardly seems fair to the poor blackmailers when they're badly outnumbered by well-armed victims too despicable to root for. ($275,000 ad/promo combined with paperback publication of Choke)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017666-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
