Review by New York Times Review
MEDICAL MYSTERIES CAN be so messy, what with all those untidy body parts and slippery viscera. THE HOLLOW MEN (Pegasus Crime, $25.95), a first novel by the pseudonymous Rob McCarthy, delivers its gruesome details in the authentic voice of the medical student McCarthy happens to be. The stage is set at John Ruskin University Hospital in London, where Harry Kent, on duty at the Accident & Emergency department and on police call as a medical examiner, saves the life of Solomon Idris, a desperate teenager shot by trigger-happy cops during a bungled hostage standoff at a fast-food restaurant. Harry has his quirks. ("Every hospital had its speed addicts ... but Harry was careful.") And he's not proud of having betrayed his best friend. ("Long story short, I slept with his wife.") But he's heroic in a crisis and obsessively devoted to some of his sadder cases, like Zara, his name for an unidentified girl who's been comatose since 2011. When she arrived at the hospital, her hair had been shocking pink and as it grew out Harry made sure it was dyed the same color. Because he regards his nerve-racking job with a certain sense of awe and his professional efforts with a degree of modesty, Harry is much more complicated than the conventional fearless hero. Maybe that's because he secretly feels like one of T. S. Eliot's hollow men, forever searching for something to fill his empty soul. That would also explain why he feels responsible for people like Zara and Idris, who have no one else "to speak for them." Whatever his sins, Harry doesn't deserve to be made a scapegoat when someone tries to murder Idris - for what reason, no one knows - as he lies helpless in the hospital in a coma. And although the plot, centered on violent youth gangs in depressed areas, is fairly predictable, it's presented with jarring realism and zero sentimentality. McCarthy's piercing view of the fortified world of a big metropolitan hospital reflects the perspective of an insider who may sometimes wish he weren't so close to the action. COULD YOU LIVE without kittens? How about books? Could you live without books? In THE GIRL BEFORE (Ballantine, $27), J P Delaney offers a diabolical choice - a chance to live in the house of your dreams if you renounce almost all material attachments. Both Jane Cavendish and the property's previous tenant, Emma Matthews, have made considerable sacrifices to live at 1 Folgate Street, an extraordinary ultraminimalist mansion ("a compact cube of pale stone") that comes with some 200 restrictive rules of occupancy, set by the architect. The bans on children, pets and loud parties are only the beginning; tenants are forbidden to introduce so much as a throw pillow into this austere environment, which is electronically programmed to monitor itself. Unsurprisingly, that hyperattentiveness also distinguishes the architect, Edward Monkford, who romances both women, giving them identical jewels and introducing them to cosmopolitan delights like eating live seafood. There's a distinct creepiness to this claustrophobic story, but in time common sense triumphs; what initially felt deliciously sinister eventually seems schematic and just plain sadistic. IT'S THE "SEASON OF GRAY" in Randall Silvis's chilly suspense novel TWO DAYS GONE (Sourcebooks Landmark, paper, $15.99), a wintry time when "surliness prevails" in the northwestern wedge of Pennsylvania. There a wanted man hides in the woods, "numb with cold and hunger and disbelief." The fugitive is Tom Huston, a locally well-liked novelist who fled his house two days earlier, leaving his wife and three children slaughtered in their beds. Now Sgt. Ryan DeMarco has been charged with directing the hunt for a man he has come to know as a friend. Silvis tells his parallel stories - of Huston's mad wanderings in the forest and DeMarco's reluctant dragnet - with finely tuned sensitivity. The novelist uses brute willpower to close his mind to painful reality, while the policeman struggles to understand his quarry by reading Huston's notes for an unfinished novel. "How much of the voice was artifice and how much a reflection of the man?" DeMarco wonders. He asks the same question of himself, then supplies his own answer. "We are all made up," he says. "We are only real at night." JOANNE HARRIS DELIVERS mischief and murder to an English prep school in DIFFERENT CLASS (Touchstone, $26), a delightfully malicious view of privileged students with overly active imaginations. The novel's alarming events are mostly related by Roy Straitley, a crotchety Latin master with a droll sense of humor and a partiality for students who are "rebels and clowns." In deference to the new reformist headmaster at St. Oswald's Grammar School for Boys, Straitley will deign to invite visiting parents into his office, "much as folklore dictates we should invite a vampire before he can feed." He draws the line, though, at trivializing the classics department or (God forbid!) consolidating with Mulberry House, a school for girls. But, as we learn from the diary of someone with a disturbing taste for torturing animals, more dangerous forces lie elsewhere. Years earlier, Harry Clarke, a charismatic English teacher, had been unfairly accused of pederasty and charged with murder. But, thanks to Straitley, we now know where to look for the true spawn of Satan.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
One of the two leads in this impressive novel is author Thomas Huston; the other, Ryan DeMarco, is a policeman who quotes poetry and is flattered to be the writer's friend. Both men live in close relation to language, and that would seem to be a requirement for readers' complete enjoyment of Silvis' ambitious take on crime fiction. Huston's novels are both popular and respected, and he has a snug berth on the faculty of an English department. A beautiful family, too. So why did he kill them? And if he didn't, why has he vanished? DeMarco has a feeling that a solution to the mystery, as well as a key to his friend's whereabouts, lies in Huston's novel-in-progress. This leads him, much to his surprise, into a world of strip clubs and trailer parks and to phrases like, all the night's litter emptied now of its noise and bluff and whiskey-ed bravado. These literary interludes glow, but to the restless, they may serve to weigh down an intriguing thriller. On the other hand, readers with patience and a taste for sumptuous language will find the novel a treat.--Crinklaw, Don Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this skillfully written thriller set in western Pennsylvania from Silvis (On Night's Shore), Thomas Huston, a respected Shenango College professor and acclaimed author, appears to have murdered his wife, Claire, and their three children in their beds. Huston recently lost both his parents. Did he snap? Sgt. Ryan DeMarco, a state policeman and a friend of the suspect-who's coping with his own personal tragedy-takes the case hoping to find some answers. On the Shenango campus, he meets a student, Nathan Briessen, who steers him to information about a novel that Huston was researching. Literary references to Nabokov and Poe, some meta-moments about characters and writers, fiction and truth, as well as DeMarco's complicated relationship with his wife, Laraine, add seasoning to the plot. By alternating between Huston and DeMarco's narratives, Silvis nimbly puzzles out what took place on the night of the multiple murders, and what it means to go on after a loss. Agent: Sandy Lu, L. Perkins Agency. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This novel revolves around two men with nothing in common: one a famous writer and professor, the other a disheartened detective. Yet, a bond is formed between the pair that will be stretched to the breaking point. Sgt. Ryan DeMarco arrives at a horrific crime scene-Thomas Huston's butchered wife and children. All signs point to the disappeared professor as the murderer. DeMarco cannot accept that his friend would do something so evil, not when he seemed to love his family so much. -DeMarco is a wonderfully flawed protagonist, barely keeping his head above water after losing his son years earlier. This loss has caused his life to spiral out of control, which is why he finds it so unbelievable that Huston snapped and threw all he had away. So what happened that night, and why is Huston on the run? As DeMarco traces the suspect's steps and delves into a half-finished manuscript Huston left behind, he starts to uncover a tangled web of lies, deceit, and wrongdoing. VERDICT Silvis (The Boy Who Shoots Crows) has given us a suspenseful, literary thriller that will resonate with readers long after the book is finished. A terrific choice for Dennis Lehane fans. [See Prepub Alert, 7/18/16.]-Marianne Fitzgerald, Severna Park H.S., MD © Copyright 2016. 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 Pennsylvania police officer digs deep, then still deeper, into the mystery of an inexplicably slaughtered family.Professor Thomas Huston seemed to have it all: a successful career as a novelist, a position as a popular teacher at Shenango College, a loving wife, and three children too young to have grown away from him yet. So why on earth would he have taken a razor to their throats before disappearing into the night? Why, even if he felt compelled to end their lives, would he have varied his technique for his baby son, stabbing him in the heart instead? And why, if hes so determined to run away, does he keep hovering around the town, telephoning his friends only to read them poems by Edgar Allan Poe? Sgt. Ryan DeMarco counts himself as one of those friends, but he finds Hustons behavior, whether or not hes as guilty as he looks, as inexplicable as everyone else. Unlike everyone else, however, DeMarco cant let go of these agonizing riddles. Still mourning the death of his own baby son in a car crash, he feels an uncanny kinship to Huston, an intimacy that deepens when he retraces the writers steps to Whispers, the strip club where Huston had cultivated owner Bonnie Harris and dancer Danni Reynolds as models for Annabel, the heroine of his latest novel. As DeMarco, whos a lot better at butting heads with station commander Sgt. Kyle Bowen, the supervisor he used to supervise before his demotion, than at detective work, struggles to make sense of Hustons behavior, Silvis (The Boy Who Shoots Crows, 2011, etc.) intercuts his inquiries with glimpses into Hustons tantalizingly underspecified memories of the fatal night until the two men finally collide in the first of several memorable lurches into resolution. Beneath the momentum of the investigation lies a pervasive sadness that will stick with you long after youve turned the last page. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
