Fast, light, and witty, Sutton’s second novel is a pleasure.
This fast-moving, wiseass, noir tale of murder and Hollywood features the return of bodyguard and bouncer Caleb Rush (Crush, 2015).
Crush (Caleb’s street name) has a simple task: his old friend Rachel Fury is paying him $500 to deliver an envelope and pick up a suitcase. The envelope is supposed to contain letters of transit from the movie Casablanca, for a collector of movie memorabilia. The suitcase is supposed to be full of cash, but both parties cheat each other. For her part, Rachel is “a part-time artist, part-time actress, and full-time grifter.” “It’s all a movie, Crush. And I’m the lead…conning rich bad guys and winning the heart of the Hunky Good-hearted Bodyguard Action Hero,” a perfect description of Crush. Like many of the characters, she’s manic and funny. Several years later, Crush happens upon an Oscar-nominated actress named Rachel Strayhorn passed out in a Porsche in the parking lot of a nightclub, dress hiked up and panty-free, being photographed by a bunch of guys with cellphones. Crush recognizes his friend Fury: “It’s a long con,” she tells him when he pulls her out of the car. “A very long con.” She even has her “very own stalker.” Crush, on the other hand, is a quiet tough guy who doesn’t use guns. “Your guns are you,” Rachel says. Her father, Lloyd, calls Crush “half Cossack and half Roman centurion.” Still, she says Crush will never make it as a grifter, because he’s too soft. Indeed, he hasn’t pulled a con in 10 years. They meet up with “film director and professional bad boy” Adam Udell, who makes action movies and has built a gleaming white pyramid in a cemetery as his “tomb-in-waiting.” People die, and Crush jumps bail after a bogus murder charge, but those are details in a tight plot that culminates in Oscar Night, where Rachel and Adam are both up for awards.
Fast, light, and witty, Sutton’s second novel is a pleasure.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-938849-84-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Prospect Park Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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