Maroney deglamorizes the world of private investigators while limning their sometimes essential, sometimes damaging work.
A revealing look at the world of the private detective, which isn’t quite as Raymond Chandler imagined it.
“We are everywhere,” Maroney writes of detectives employed by private concerns rather than governments. Having begun his career, like so many PIs, in journalism (academia is another field ripe for recruitment), he reels off employers: large companies, movie studios, wealthy individuals, media outlets, even some government agencies, all of which need some critical piece of information. This can be of a rather sleazy nature—e.g., a juicy detail that will undo a spouse’s divorce proceedings or, in the case of the disgraced entertainment executive Harvey Weinstein, “compromising information on women Weinstein had allegedly victimized (such as Rose McGowan) and journalists whose articles Weinstein sought to quash (such as Jodi Kantor).” The classic PI modus operandi involves disguising one’s identity and deceiving—or, in polite parlance, socially engineering—one’s way into the confidence of the person who holds the desired information. Sometimes this is criminal, sometimes not, but in any event, Maroney pointedly observes, the behavior is ubiquitous and lucrative. It is especially lucrative for the hackers in the PI world, who steal into offices in the middle of the night and copy sensitive computer data without attracting attention or suspicion—a pro tip, Maroney offers, is to remove a hard drive from a computer before copying it off, since USB connections and computer logs tell tales. Having cracked a company’s system, the PI is then often hired to build an electronic fortress around it, double-dipping at its best. There’s more poor Joe Schmo than James Bond in the whole enterprise, writes the author, and the ethics are iffy (“sometimes our work benefits the social good; sometimes we are the instruments of moral outrage”). Whatever the case, being a corporate/private detective is a growth industry, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon, which says something about the world in which we live.
Maroney deglamorizes the world of private investigators while limning their sometimes essential, sometimes damaging work.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59463-259-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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