An exhausting novel with unbelievable characters, an unintelligible plot, and an unpalatable literary style.
In Bloom’s novel, a private detective investigates several interconnected cases while battling his own addictions.
In California, Jean Barry is a private investigator with no shortage of cases to work—in fact, he has a strange surfeit of them, all of them entangled and convoluted to the point of being impenetrable. For example, he’s hired by Hel Lambert, a car salesman, to investigate an airline’s efforts to intimidate him into selling his lot—at one point, Hel is kidnapped and abused by a “gangly group of swashbucklers,” surely sent by company executives. Jean is also engaged by Charles Brubaker, the head of the airline in question, to find his vanished girlfriend, Vittoria Vitti, who happens to be an old flame of Jean’s. Meanwhile, a sketchy organization called Dynamo Properties, a “shadow operation by Hollywood bigwigs”—it’s never quite clear what they do—is keeping an eye on Charles, who has an initial public offering in the billions on the horizon. Additionally, they task Jean with spying on their own spy, Dohltrey, whom they suspect is a traitorous double agent. During all this work, Jean also manages to find time to help Monica, an actor who, following a public humiliation at the Oscars, is now involved in same-sex pornography: “She was never boinked,” notes the third-person narration. In part to help her, he pitches a movie idea to Rex, a film producer in need of a script for a project that he describes as “The Big Sleep meets Trainspotting.”
Trainspotting is an apt comparison, as much of this novel is devoted to Jean’s indulgences, which run the gamut from alcohol to peyote. The entire work is written in an unnatural manner that unsuccessfully aims for stylishness, as when Charles asks Jean to find Vittoria in a speech that’s nearly unreadable: “I lack the gumption for somewhat shoddy matters, this matter, in particular, concerns my self, my auxiliaries, and yourself, if you accept, the concern being that my lady has gone awry and I cannot be certain she may do harm to not only herself but also to the aforementioned parties. I am afraid it is a grave matter, indeed.” The primary failing of the novel, however, is not the incomprehensibility of its dialogue, but of its plot. For example, readers know that Dynamo Properties somehow manages to “control the media’s information overload” and spreads disinformation to its clients, but the practical details are left exasperatingly vague. The novel effectively approaches clarity toward the end when Jean is compelled to confront his ungovernable addictions and reconcile himself to the loss of Vittoria. However, neither of these promising avenues are adequately developed. Moreover, the prose style is frequently overwrought—a peculiar brew of classic detective patois and the pretentious postmodern philosophy, as when readers learn Jean feels rudderless: “The map was gone. Or had everything just melted into some amorphous form, magma at the core of a deep shaft that was yet to cool off into a form of considerable consequence?”
An exhausting novel with unbelievable characters, an unintelligible plot, and an unpalatable literary style.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781944527006
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Natural Press
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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
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