An overlong novel that’s weighed down by unnecessary digressions.
In Steele’s novel, a parole officer stumbles on a web of corruption at work.
Cleveland “Cleve” Ishmael works for the Department of Corrections in Kumhokot County, Pennsylvania; more specifically, he works for the Home Detention Unit, which oversees inmates who’ve been permitted to serve out their sentences in the confines of their own residences. Readers quickly understand that he’s witnessed some sort of grave corruption in his own ranks, and that he felt compelled to discuss it with an authority. However, the details are revealed at a numbingly slow pace over more than 600 pages. Eventually, Cleve notes that he happened upon some irregularities in the casefiles of a fellow parole officer, who mysteriously vanished. As Cleve investigated further, he uncovered a dark tangle of impropriety and crime, which included unspeakable injustices. The book is framed as a transcript of Cleve’s responses to questions asked by a mental health clinician, who’s evaluating his fitness for work, given the clear signs of PTSD he’s exhibiting.The interview is wide-ranging, as the protagonist discusses his family lineage, his childhood, and the death of his parents, all in a style so unhurried that he repeatedly notes the fact that it drifts off-topic. In an afterword, Steele declares his intention to “satirize…hateful, cruel rhetoric and attitudes to the point of ironic caricature.” However, the book delivers no real satire; instead, readers experience the childish crudeness of Cleve, who repeatedly refers to the clinician with epithets such as “dumb fuck” and “numb-nuts,” and to people in his profession as “cock-swallowing thunder-cunts.” Indeed, he seems to delight in using offensive terminology: “I use the term retard a lot, and it upsets you, because maybe you know a retard, and he’s a good guy, or maybe she’s your daughter and you love her, or maybe you’re in love with one.” None of this is particularly dark or funny, which challenges Steele’s announcement that it’s a work of “dark, comedic fiction.” The novel’s singular virtue is its description of the “Democratic-political machine” in Pennsylvania, and its well-documented, labyrinthine corruption.
An overlong novel that’s weighed down by unnecessary digressions.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798375696133
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.
Unbeknownst to each other, Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett and outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski embark on equally urgent pursuits that converge in a way neither of them suspects.
Nate, who’s been off the grid ever since his wife, Liv, was killed in a fire intended to kill him too in Three-Inch Teeth (2024), has sworn vengeance on murderous conspirator Axel Soledad. After shooting several of Soledad’s hirelings, he joins forces with his friend and fellow Special Forces vet Geronimo Jones, who’s tracked him down, to chase his quarry deep into the woods. Governor Spencer Rulon, meanwhile, has pressed Joe into service once again to find veteran hunting guide Spike Rankin and his new assistant, Mark Eisele, who just happens to be Rulon’s son-in-law. Although nobody’s heard from the men for two days, the governor doesn’t want his wife and daughter to know they’re missing, and that means not alerting the media or the local sheriff, who’s no fan of Rulon’s anyway. Readers who’ve already seen Rankin and Eisele overpowered and imprisoned by a mysterious crew they ran into while they were setting up for the elk hunting season will assume that Soledad is behind their kidnapping as well. But Box will keep everyone guessing about exactly how Soledad and the ragtag military cult he’s gathered around him plan to confront the military-industrial complex he’s persuaded them is a clear and present danger. You know you’re in for a wild ride when Joe, saying goodbye to Marybeth, his long-suffering wife, promises her, “I’ll do my job and not cross the line.”
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851050
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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