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Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. Superb prose and psychological insights distinguish Loehfelm's debut. Because Staten Island bartender John Sanders Jr. was regularly physically abused as a child by his father, he reacts at first with indifference to the news that John Senior has been killed, execution style, by an unknown assailant. The death has a greater impact on Sanders's sister, Julia, who returns from Boston to make the necessary arrangements and to attempt to reconnect with her brother to create some sense of family from their mutual childhood trauma. While Sanders channels some of his frustration and anger into a search for answers, the emphasis is on family relationships rather than mystery solving. Loehfelm excels in making Staten Island itself a palpable presence, brilliantly evoking the reek of the world's largest landfill that gives the novel its name, as well as the despair of the local residents. (Aug. 21)Note: Loehfelm is the winner of Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award, a contest in which PW reviewed manuscript submissions. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Loehfelm's gritty first novel, set on Staten Island, examines the grim life of John Junior Sanders, who learns that his father has been brutally murdered. Abused by his father as a child, Junior, now in his thirties, was long estranged from the man and greets the news of his demise with anger that now he won't have the opportunity to kill him one day. Upon reflection, he decides that, for him to close the book on his father and begin to turn his own life around, he will need to investigate how he died. His sister offers to help, although she, too, has a past she would like to forget. The father's murder eventually takes a backseat to John's reflections on how he ended up with the aimless life he leads (working as a bartender, engaging in an unsatisfying affair with an old high-school sweetheart). More psychological noir than crime thriller, this edgy debut won't engage narrative-driven readers but will please those willing to follow Junior into the dark places of his past.--Ayers, Jeff Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Having piloted a grown-up Tiny Tim through Dickensian London in "Mr. Timothy" and enlisted Edgar Allan Poe in the hunt for a killer in upstate New York in "The Pale Blue Eye," Louis Bayard repairs to Paris in THE BLACK TOWER (Morrow, $24.95) for another daring historical adventure - this time in the company of the greatest of French detectives, Eugène François Vidocq. The real-life Vidocq was unmatched as a figure of romantic legend. On the run as a thief, he offered his services to the law, becoming so adept at catching criminals that in 1811 he was named the first chief of the Sûreté, whose detective ranks he filled with former miscreants like himself. A scientific criminologist, he instituted modern procedures in all areas of police work, from ballistics to record-keeping. But it was his swaggering ego and mastery of disguise, as much as his forensic methods, that won him iconic status among authors like Balzac, Hugo, Melville and Poe. Bayard makes brilliant application of Vidocq in this fanciful adventure, which takes place in the unsettled era of Restoration France and rekindles the rumor that Louis-Charles, the 10-year-old son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, did not die in the black tower of his fortress prison in 1795. Who better than Vidocq to navigate these treacherous political shoals, teeming with embittered royalists, seditious republicans and die-hard Bonapartites? Presenting himself in the filthy rags of a beggar (the first of many vivid disguises), the detective orchestrates the hectic action with operatic flamboyance. The narrative chores he leaves to Hector Carpentier, son of the physician, now deceased, who ministered to the dauphin in prison and might have been party to a plot to free the boy. If so, then the artless young man Hector and Vidocq discover in the country town of Saint-Cloud (and must repeatedly rescue from armed assassins) might very well be the true king of France. No snatch-and-run researcher, Bayard takes care to capture Vidocq's roguish voice and grandiose affectations, as well as the melodramatic substance of his published memoirs. While there are glimpses of the elegant Bourbon court, Bayard's primary settings are the foul back alleys of Vidocq's Paris. "I've seen more English tourists in the morgue than in the Louvre," Hector says, putting his finger on the perverse appeal of viewing a beautiful city naked, soaking in the bath of its own bloody history. Marina Marks, the haunted heroine of Debra Ginsberg's clever thriller, THE GRIFT (Shaye Areheart, $23.95), considers herself to be an honest psychic. Unlike those "Gypsies, santeros and voodooiennes" who ply their trade in her South Florida community by sacrificing live chickens and sticking pins into dolls, Marina makes her own shady living by her wits. Applying sharp observation and intuition, she wins the confidence of needy clients like Mrs. Golden, who entrusts her with a valuable ruby ring in the belief that the gift will protect the elderly woman's beloved son from harm. But that ring proves a curse when Marina skips to San Diego and develops a new client base. Ginsberg has a nice way with offbeat characters like Madeline, the pampered wife of a very rich, very angry man; Cooper, whose "boundary issues" hinder his pursuit of a closeted gay psychiatrist; and Eddie, a womanizer who won't take "Get lost, you creep" for an answer. Once Marina's true psychic gifts kick in, making it impossible for her to lie, her clients turn nasty. Given her own storytelling gift, Ginsberg easily counters the suggestion that her plot is schematic. As Marina would testify, "The very concept of randomness was something created to stave off the crush of inevitability." Bill Loehfelm is one of those first-time novelists who don't want to tell a story so much as get it all out of their system. The bottled-up emotions he uncorks in FRESH KILLS (Putnam, $24.95) belong to Junior Sanders, a Staten Island bartender who becomes almost incoherent with rage when he learns that his father has been shot to death, gangland style, outside a deli. That's not grief Junior is choking on, but hatred for the old man, a mean drunk who abused him and his mother and made a nervous wreck of his sister. Junior's attempt to beat the cops to the killer may be a weak plot device, but it's a good excuse to roam this often ignored borough, picking over its garbage and brooding on its wounds. In genre fiction, making your city look bad is a sign of deep affection - which is precisely the message conveyed in new books by two Chicago writers. In Michael Harvey's latest novel, THE FIFTH FLOOR (Knopf, $23.95), Michael Kelly, the cocky P.I. hero of Harvey's nifty retro-noir series, wants to pin a domestic abuse charge on one of the mayor's "fixers," the polite term for a problem solver who "makes things go away." But when Kelly comes across the murdered body of a historian-with an interest in the Great Chicago Fire, he uncovers a conspiracy so deeply entrenched that no fixer can make it go away. Marcus Sakey sees Chicago as a constant source of sin and temptation for weak souls who can't catch a break. In GOOD PEOPLE (Dutton, $24.95), he saddles Tom and Anna Reed with an ethical challenge when they find $375,000 hidden in the apartment of a tenant who died in their building. Once they give in to temptation, these foolish but tenderly drawn innocents find themselves in a classic bind, unable to outrun the criminals, outwit the cops or find their way home again. 'I've seen more English tourists in the morgue than in the Louvre,' Louis Bayard's Parisian narrator says.
Library Journal Review
The setting of Loehfelm's debut novel is Staten Island, NY, where the author himself, an ex-pizza joint manager, grew up. Thirtysomething bartender Junior Sanders answers a knock at the door and learns from the police that his father's been shot dead on the street. Conflicted because his father was abusive toward him, Junior sets off, reeling, on a search for the killer. Already dreadfully slow as an audio title, this production is further deadened by Obie Award-winning actor/narrator Gary Wilmes's monotone presentation. Recommended only for public libraries on Staten Island. [Audio clip available through us.penguingroup.com; the Putnam hc won an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.--Ed.]--Douglas C. Lord, Connecticut State Lib., Hartford (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
