An entertaining suspense tale that plays celebrity mythology against reality in intriguing ways.
Rocker Lou Reed emerges from the doldrums by investigating a killing that may implicate Andy Warhol’s Factory scene in this mordant murder mystery.
Gomez spins his novel around a real-life low point in the rock god’s career after he quit the Velvet Underground in 1970. Reed worked as a typist for $40 a week at his dad Sidney’s accounting firm on Long Island, an unfathomable plunge into banality from the musician’s former place in the glam Manhattan demimonde swirling around his mentor Andy Warhol. In this mystery, Lou discovers that Sidney is paying to store the possessions, including a Warhol painting, of one Samuel Donato, who was shot to death in 1967. Looking into the incident, Lou learns from Warhol and Factory regulars that he knew Donato even though he has no recollection of it, a common occurrence ever since electroshock treatments in college impaired his memory. Lou is stonewalled by Sidney, and everyone else and gets a beating from a man who’s trying to steal the valuable painting. But the rocker unearths evidence that Donato was pitching a murder-for-art’s-sake scheme to Warhol and may have been killed for it by Lou himself. Much of the fun of Gomez’s tale is the spectacle of Lou, patron saint of wildness, deviancy, and heroin, marooned in his childhood bedroom, seething at Sidney’s lectures and festering in suburbia—“Nothing but car dealerships and department stores. Gas stations and muffler shops. Flat mediocrity everywhere he looks”—after his formation in the crucible of the Factory. (“Drag queens, drugs, cameras filming every moment and Andy, always in the background, making things….Everyone was either creative or crazy and, after you’ve been up for three days on speed, you really couldn’t tell the difference.”) The author’s sly, deadpan prose captures both settings and their denizens in wonderfully evocative detail, especially Warhol’s blend of cool and crass. (“Did you see the retrospective in Pasadena?...It was fabulous. A soup can sold the next day for sixty thousand. Can you believe it?”) As Lou unravels the darker threads of his past, the war for his soul takes surprising and resonant twists. The result is a page-turner that will make Reed’s fans think again about his character.
An entertaining suspense tale that plays celebrity mythology against reality in intriguing ways.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 165
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.
A routine break-in at the home of Sûreté homicide chief Armand Gamache leads slowly but surely to the revelation of a potentially calamitous threat to all Québec.
At first it seems as if nothing at all triggered the burglar alarm at Gamache’s home in Three Pines; it was literally a false alarm. It’s not till he receives a package containing his summer jacket that Gamache realizes someone really did get into his house, choosing to steal exactly this one item and return it with a cryptic note referring to “some malady…water” and “Angelica stems.” Having already refused to meet with Jeanne Caron, chief of staff to Marcus Lauzon, a powerful politician who’s already taken vengeance on Gamache and his family for not expunging his child’s criminal record, Gamache now agrees to meet with Charles Langlois, a marine biologist with ties to Caron who confesses to a leading role in stealing Gamache’s jacket. Their meeting ends inconclusively for Gamache, who’s convinced that Langlois is hiding something weighty, and all too conclusively for Langlois, who’s killed by a hit-and-run driver as he leaves. The news that Langlois had been investigating a water supply near the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups sends Gamache scurrying off to the abbey, where the plot steadily thickens until he’s led to ask how “an old recipe for Chartreuse” can possibly be connected to “a terrorist plot to poison Québec’s drinking water.” That’s a great question, and answering it will take the second half of this story, which spins ever more intricate connections among leading players that become deeply unsettling.
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781250328137
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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
© 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.
