Review by New York Times Review
IN THE PROLOGUE to Tawni O'Dell's ONE OF US (Gallery Books, $25), when 6-year-old Danny Doyle flees one of his father's drunken late-night rampages, his grandfather tries to distract him by recounting the story of the Nellies, a band of Irish immigrants whose violent attempts to improve working conditions in the coal mines of Lost Creek, Pa., resulted in their mass execution. It makes for a strange bedtime story, and along with several of the chapters that follow, it's threaded with a confusing tangle of details about the town's history. But once O'Dell flashes forward to the present day, it's clear the Nellies' execution has left a permanent bruise on the soul of Lost Creek, a bruise its residents are still trying to heal through talk. The prison-yard gallows are a tourist attraction that draws ghost-hunting reality shows, and young Danny is now Dr. Sheridan Doyle, a celebrity forensic psychologist known for analyzing the minds of human monsters. Doyle's passion for the study of criminal madness didn't come from the ether; his mother, after being found guilty of murdering his baby sister, was sent to prison for 20 years despite ample evidence she was clinically insane. She's free now, but also "nomadic, delusional, kleptomaniac, bipolar." When Doyle returns home for the first time in years, it's not because he looks forward to reuniting with a mentally ill parent who has resisted his every attempt at care; it's because he's received a concerned call from his grandfather's doctor. Doyle lays out this buffet of trauma and loss in the first person, in present-tense chapters that leave us wondering if he is too weary and resigned to overcome any of it. At the outset, "One of Us" threatens to be a loosely structured treatise on how institutional injustice can breed fatal family dysfunctions among the working poor. Then we're introduced to Scarlet Dawes, one of the subtler and more convincing psychopaths to grace a thriller in recent memory. Draped in designer labels, the great-granddaughter of the powerful coal baron responsible for the Nellies' unjust trial (and public execution) has also been summoned home against her will, by the cousin of one of her family's deceased employees, a woman who claims to harbor a dark secret about Scarlet's past. O'Dell coyly keeps the substance of this terrible secret under wraps for a while, but Scarlet's reaction is shocking and instantaneous, and delivered in the same type of first-person present-tense chapters used to introduce the novel's hero. Once this effective counterpoint between psychiatrist and psychopath is established, "One of Us" evolves swiftly into a fearless exploration of the line between mental illness and true evil, a place many thriller writers visit but without the kind of fearless insights O'Dell reveals in this powerful novel. The grotesquely sadistic serial killer at the center of Sergey Kuznetsov's BUTTERFLY SKIN (Titan, paper, $14.95) has a knack for comparing himself to the very pop culture monsters a critic might use to bring him down to size. Patrick Bateman of "American Psycho" and Leatherface, the chain-saw-wielding maniac from Texas, are just two of the murderous icons who turn up in disturbing journal entries written by the so-called Moscow Psycho, a savage predator who swims in a kind of excruciating self-awareness even while documenting wince-inducing descriptions of the torture he inflicts on his victims. While the marketing for "Butterfly Skin" proclaims it as Russia's answer to "The Silence of the Lambs," none of the plot devices employed by that classic of the genre are in effect here. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. The Moscow Psycho doesn't make the mistake of abducting a powerful politician's daughter, and it isn't until the book's final chapters that the proceedings approach anything close to a game of cat-and-mouse. For most of the novel (translated by Andrew Bromfield), Kuznetsov's brutal killer remains a detached presence, whose monstrous legacy looms stormlike over a group of Internet journalists struggling for a sense of purpose as their industry is gripped by a BuzzFeed-style insistence of blending advertising with reporting. At the center of this group is Ksenia, a young news editor whose fascination with the killer leads her to launch a website focused on his crimes. She claims the objective is to help authorities arrest the killer. But Ksenia is a masochist who cannot experience sexual pleasure without first experiencing extreme pain. The Moscow Psycho, on the other hand, enjoyed the most powerful orgasm of his life while watching a brutal on-screen killing in a horror film. Throw in the anonymity afforded by Internet communication, and the seeds of a love story from hell are sown early. But Kuznetsov waits a good while before allowing them to flower. In the meantime, we're given chapters thick with details about characters who are neither victims nor outright heroes. The result is a sustained look into the culture of Russian Internet journalism that should appeal to readers who like their thrillers strewn with journalistic details that don't belong in evidence bags. Kuznetsov also offers up a sometimes-engrossing interrogation of our own fascination with savage violence. The novel's most frightening moments come when his killer-obsessed journalists flex their extensive knowledge of the latest research in serial killer psychology, upending cozy narratives about where human monsters come from and how easily they can be spotted. Books that chronicle sadism this extensively typically deliver cop-out endings in which the author makes a shrieking, blood-soaked claim that all human beings are only seconds away from tearing one another to shreds. But when the Moscow Psycho finally strikes close to home, forcing Ksenia into a series of Clarice Starling-like moves, Kuznetsov aims for more than smug nihilism. He delivers a gratifying conclusion to a sometimes overburdened and sickening journey through sadism and alienation. The serial killer in Lauren Beukes's BROKEN MONSTERS (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26) is an artist. His first killing fuses the torso of a young impoverished boy with the lower half of a deer, "hooves and all." These aren't just mutilations, he believes. His victims are subjects, his killings art. Meanwhile, he perceives vast supernatural forces spilling through a series of chalk-outline doorways someone (or something) has drawn inside abandoned buildings across Detroit's blighted landscape. Is he insane or legitimately possessed? Beukes doesn't answer this question fully until the well-executed final chapters of her thriller, but the journey there is exquisitely paced and impeccably controlled. The novel's sturdy emotional center comes from the rich, nuanced relationship between Detective Gabriella Versado, the cop in charge of finding the killer, and her teenage daughter, Layla. Beukes's depictions of teenagers in general are a welcome reprieve. The current trend among novelists and screenwriters alike is to depict adolescents as bottomless reservoirs of meanness and their parents hapless idiots scratching fruitlessly at their stone hearts. Here the domestic emotional struggles of the crusading cop and her precocious daughter are as engrossing as the hunt for the killer. Beukes also commits to the other members of her ensemble cast with brisk, suspenseful chapters that crackle with authentic shifts in narrative voice. For the most part, "Broken Monsters" recalls the best novels of Richard Price, in which compelling, finely etched characters collide while orbiting a series of crimes that have shaken their community to its roots. In this case, the community is modern-day Detroit, where gangs of artists are literally turning urban decay into artwork. Beukes moves effortlessly through many of the city's worlds, from police precincts to the Internet-driven secret lives of teenage girls and the homeless shelters and mostly dead neighborhoods of a hobbled American city, all while teasing a disturbingly beautiful and possibly supernatural universe existing at its borders. The end result is an enormously satisfying novel that employs the best attributes of multiple genres to dramatize big ideas about art, the Internet and urban decay. Gérard de Villiers wrote 200 novels in his Malko Linge series before his death in 2013. This year, he's being published in the United States for the first time since the 1970s. In THE MADMEN OF BENGHAZI (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, paper, $14.95), a terrorist missile comes within several feet of destroying a passenger plane carrying the wealthy Libyan expatriate Ibrahim al-Senussi and his gorgeous British girlfriend, Cynthia Mulligan. Al-Senussi, it turns out, is the C.I.A.'s best hope of holding back an anti-Western caliphate in Libya after Qaddafi falls. Has a terrorist organization secretly lured al-Senussi to the Middle East so they can dispose of him? Is Cynthia Mulligan's bisexuality proof that she's party to the plot, or is she in it just for the expensive gifts? To answer these questions, the C.I.A. calls in one of their freelancers, the Austrian playboy Malko Linge, to seduce Mulligan. Linge rivals James Bond in popularity with many readers outside the United States. But it's not difficult to see why American publishers have attempted to introduce him here only in fits and starts. He has neither the rough charm of a cowboy nor the admirable courage of a true rogue. Rather, his commitment to his mission is defined by his dedication to his wallet - an interesting quality in a hero if accompanied by some level of self-deprecating sarcasm, or an open, critical disdain of the system on which he depends for his sizable paychecks. No such depth is on display in "The Madmen of Benghazi," translated by William Rodarmor. Instead, Linge seems animated by a grim fatalism that somehow makes this slender novel tedious despite James Patterson-style pacing. Without an alternate point of view to make thematic sense of its assassinations and torture-driven interrogations, "The Madmen of Benghazi" feels like a perfunctory, if bloody, trip through a tortured part of the world that could use a deeper level of analysis even from the fiction writers who visit it. It's difficult to imagine a novel more antithetical in tone and scope to "The Madmen of Benghazi" than Richard House's THE KILLS (Picador, $35), despite the fact that the books share a focus on bloody Western misadventures in violent Middle Eastern nations. Clocking in at just over 1,000 pages, "The Kills" bills itself as four separate books in one. When read only in summary, the general setup of each might sound misleadingly conventional to fans of international thrillers. In Book 1, "Sutler," a duplicitous Western operative ends up on the run through the Middle East after narrowly avoiding death in a bombing designed to cover up his employer's corrupt business dealings in Iraq. In Book 2, "The Massive," financially pressed Americans accept high-paying work as civilian contractors in Iraq only to become snared in the maw of a merciless and corrupt war machine. In Book 3, "The Kill," a student's savage murder rocks the city of Naples. In Book 4, "The Hit," an innocent young woman becomes the victim of a slow seduction from a man whose past is menacingly suspect. But beyond their plot lines there's nothing conventional about the contents of these volumes. Despite the tenuous closure offered by the last pages of "The Hit," the structure of each volume could best be described as cyclonic; each churns up great tides of debris left by a particular crime while simultaneously driving the central characters far outside the reach of a quick rescue. In the end, the long tentacles of a Halliburton-like civilian contractor draw each section into a single despair-filled assemblage. There are moments when this gargantuan structure threatens to topple. Book 1's climax hinges on a drastic and infuriating decision made by one of House's most unsympathetic characters. It feels unmotivated, and it's one of a few instances in which House seems to beat the drums of anguish with too much self-conscious effort. By the time we leave Naples at the end of Book 3, the layering of events around a mythologized murder feels chaotic instead of ambiguous. That said, there are more successes than failures in these 1,000 pages. And the patience required to get through it all is made easy by House's insistent and electric prose style, which imbues long passages about corporate machinations with bristling suspense. Taken together, the four books of "The Kills" depict a searing landscape in which identities are lost and then stolen, and morally bankrupt institutions are aided in their corruption by the abject refusal of certain individuals to face the truth. This is not an international thriller so much as a fiercely literate attempt to subvert the thriller genre itself. CHRISTOPHER RICE'S most recent books are a supernatural thriller, "The Vines," andan erotic romance, "The Flame." With Eric Shaw Quinn, he hosts the Internet radio program "The Dinner Party Show."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 19, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Following The Shining Girls (2013), Beukes returns with another genre-bender boasting sympathetic characters, meticulously rendered settings, an unflinchingly realistic crime scene, and a distinctly horror-fiction atmosphere. Detroit Homicide Detective Gabriella Versado is barely balancing her career and raising a teenage daughter when she's assigned the wickedly bizarre case of a boy whose body was mutilated in a grotesque sculpture: the upper half of the body fused with the hindquarters of a deer. As Versado begins due diligence by interviewing taxidermists and hunters, fame-chasing YouTube journalist Jonno hounds her for inside information on the case. Gold-hearted T. K., homeless in America's abandoned city, is haunted by the odd doorways suddenly chalked all over the city, including at Versado's crime scene. And Versado's daughter, Layla, alternatively naive and wise beyond her years, begins testing her bravery through flirtations with Detroit's dark side. As more bodies fused with animal parts appear, accompanied by the creepy chalk-door drawings, Gabi's team hunts a serial killer touched by incomprehensible evil that will lure her, Jonno, T. K., and Layla toward a masterful, surreal climax. Beukes avoids predictability by leading readers to doubt their interpretations of motives and events, blending detection and atmospheric horror to court both hard-boiled mystery and literary-horror fans. Think Peter Straub meets Karin Slaughter.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The multiple narrators of Buekes's enthralling and totally creepy novel present a complex but ultimately satisfying listening experience. Detroit detective Gabriella Versado is investigating the murder of a young boy, whose torso was found fused to the bottom half of a deer. As more bizarre murders appear, Versado begins a dark, obsessive odyssey that will drag her, her colleagues, and her daughter to the very limits of their physical endurance and their sanity, as she chases one of the most horrifying killers in recent fiction. The five readers of this story do a sensational job of bringing this book to life, and their pacing and characterizations are spot on, offering more of a dramatic rendering than a straightforward reading. Their combined skills and talent help bring genuine chills and suspense to this genre-bending thriller, especially during the heart-stopping final minutes. A L, B/Mulholland hardcover. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Against the decaying backdrop of present-day Detroit, a series of horrific crimes appear to be the work of a twisted serial killer. But layered onto the story is a cynical look at the future of journalism and a big dollop of the supernatural. Beukes is a hugely inventive author, never afraid to borrow from whatever genre gets the job done. (LJ 7/14) (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A genuinely unsettlingin all the best waysblend of suspense and the supernatural makes this a serial-killer tale like you've never seen. Set in a crumbling contemporary Detroit, Beukes' fourth novel (The Shining Girls, 2013, etc.) seamlessly alternates between the points of view of a single mother homicide detective; her 15-year-old daughter; a wannabe journalist; a homeless man; and an artist with deep-seated psychological issues. At the scene of the crime, Detective Gabriella Versado can't remember the last time she's seen something so brutal: The top half of 11-year-old Daveyton Lafonte is fused with the hind legs of a fawn in a hideous display of human taxidermy. While it's obvious that the five storylines will eventually join together, Beukes never takes the easy route, letting each character develop organically. Versado's daughter, Layla, cautiously navigates high school in the digital age; homeless scavenger Thomas "TK" Keen warily patrols the streets; Detroit transplant Jonno Haim tries to make a name for himself by chronicling first the city's art scene and then the hunt for the killer dubbed the Detroit Monster; and sculptor Clayton Broom's creations begin to take on lives of their own. Versado's dogged pursuit of the killer, under the glare of the media spotlight, is as compelling a police procedural narrative as Broom's descent into madness and the horrors of his dream world are a truly terrifying horror story. Beukes gave us a time traveling serial killer in The Shining Girls, and the monsters in her latest tale, whether they're real or imagined, will keep you up all night. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
