A thoroughly enjoyable collection by a bona fide original.
Hapless mobsters, corrupt cops, and other fated losers play out the string in interconnected stories by the author of Gangsterland (2014).
The Low Desert is a term used to describe California deserts below 2,000 feet in altitude. The people in these tales, set mostly in and around Palm Springs, include a former black ops "goon" who finds joy and possible romance in burning down a mini-mall; a cocktail waitress at an Indian casino searching for her adopted 18-year-old Russian daughter, whose fate is revealed in another story; and a hydrology instructor at Cal State Fullerton who becomes a marijuana dealer after inventing an advanced sprinkler system he hopes to sell to a Mexican cartel. Several characters have ties to Chicago's Cupertine crime family, including Sal Cupertine, the legendary hit man reborn as Las Vegas rabbi David Cohen in Gangsterland, and prolific young killer Dark Billy Cupertine (five hits before the age of 17), who has trouble "work[ing] out the geometry" of getting his hands around a victim's exceptionally fat throat. These are stories Elmore Leonard would love—not just because the razor-sharp Goldberg wastes no words in cutting to the heart of his stories, but also because he highlights the humanity and inner lives of even his most bent characters. "There's nothing that says this life has to be lived waiting for the next shame," waxes one character. In a universe where someone referring to severed body parts can say, "In my experience, hands are pretty durable," that's saying something.
A thoroughly enjoyable collection by a bona fide original.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64009-336-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
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
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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