A compelling—and often chilling—detective yarn that manages to serve up a delectable gumbo of sharp humor and occult dread.
A hard-boiled New Orleans detective faces both real and supernatural dangers in Kaufman’s novel.
Francis Mallory is exactly what a fictional detective should be: quick with his fists, ethical if not quite good, well connected but not friendly, and drunk most of the time. Since he lives in New Orleans, he’s also an occasional guitarist and local food connoisseur. As the novel opens, he finds himself with an unwelcome new case, followed quickly by a new assistant, a sharp cookie named Grace Carlson who’s just blown into town. Mallory sends Grace’s abusive, good-for-nothing boyfriend out of town, courtesy of a one-way bus ticket, freeing Grace to help him track an old vinyl recording that shouldn’t exist. Blues guitarist Ike Zimmermann supposedly never cut a record, but rumors hint at a single recording, “Seven Moons,” that’s allegedly cursed and driving any unfortunate listeners to suicide. Naturally, a local collector wants it. Mallory tracks the record down and gives it a listen, and while he doesn’t commit suicide, he does double down on his other self-destructive behaviors: swilling down absinthe, falling for pretty Grace, and antagonizing the various suspicious men trying to get their hands on the obscure recording. A sound engineer friend confirms that the recording is technologically advanced beyond what would be expected of a Black-owned local independent label in 1952, right down to the track of rattling chains inconspicuously placed under the percussion line. Whether or not the recording has supernatural properties, enough people believe that possessing it would be very dangerous indeed, and Mallory must forestall them—and protect Grace—until he figures out the best path forward.
The hard-edged detective and his pretty, sassy secretary-assistant-love interest are American archetypes, and Kaufman successfully makes Mallory and Grace both recognizable and fresh. Grace is a goth girl in band T-shirts, Mallory a veteran of one of America’s attempts to remake the Middle East by throwing armed teenagers at it. Their prickly interplay certainly continues the tradition of Bogart and Bacall. As with any fiction set in New Orleans, the city is a prominent character, and Kaufman’s familiarity with and affection for it brings America’s most distinctive city to life. Kaufman’s prose isn’t quite laugh-out-loud funny, but it features the wry observations that would have blossomed into jokes in a lighter book. (Grace “nibble[s] at her fritters like they might bite back,” and Mallory reflects that an argument with her “felt like a tennis match, and he was getting his ass handed to him by a girl half his age.”) Any writer who decides to take on the difficult topic of voodoo, a real religion often concealed by a patina of exoticism and legend, has their work cut out for them, but Kaufman fares better than most. He acknowledges that the practice goes far beyond sticking pins in cloth dolls to locating the worst evils in their natural habitat: the human heart. People who like their detectives boozy and broken will devour this book whole, as will music lovers and New Orleans fans who like their escapism as bleak as the morning after a night on Bourbon Street.
A compelling—and often chilling—detective yarn that manages to serve up a delectable gumbo of sharp humor and occult dread.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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