In Taylor’s (Our Southern Home, 2011) crime novel set in the late 1940s, a serial killer in Birmingham, Alabama, targets African-American prostitutes, and a detective with a sense of social justice intends to stop him.
Homicide detective Joe McGrath is on his way to Sunday morning Mass when he gets a call from headquarters saying the body of a “colored” woman has been found behind a local hotel. Her partially clothed, strangled corpse is posed at an odd angle and her lips are bruised—odd characteristics that make McGrath wary. Police soon learn the woman was a prostitute, and when a second woman is strangled exactly one month later, her body again posed, McGrath fears that the town may have a psychopath on the loose. Police find 19-year-old Luke Matthew’s wallet near the latest victim, and a racist police chief is quick to pin the murder on the African-American youth. McGrath and his partner interview the teenager, however, and don’t believe he’s guilty of anything but paying for sex. Nonetheless, some other cops beat Matthew until he signs a confession. Case closed? Not when McGrath’s on the case with his new teammate, African-American private eye Sam Rucker. Although both McGrath and Rucker are admirable, especially for their progressive views about race, Taylor wisely chooses not to make his characters saints. McGrath is separated from his wife and daughter, and Rucker won’t commit to his longtime girlfriend and cheats on her. Taylor’s dialogue is terrific, with lots of swift back-and-forth that speeds the story along. That said, some readers may be annoyed by the African-American dialect (“Yes suh. She work for some white lady what lives in Southside”). Also, at one point, Taylor tries to connect the prostitutes’ bruised lips to a “Kiss of Salvation” mentioned in Scripture (Luke 7:37-38), but he doesn’t fully explain the passage, and its meaning remains unclear. The book also might have benefited from a stronger edit to catch typos and punctuation errors, but a little fine-tuning would make it top-notch. This book is a page-turner, and when the investigators finally close in on the killer, it’s impossible to set the novel down.
Fast-paced detective fiction with a 1940s flair.
Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 352
Publisher: McCaa Books
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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