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Summary
Summary
Fans of Cormac MaCarthyÂs No Country for Old Menand Tony HillermanÂs Navajo County mysteries will find Michael McGarrityÂs Dead or Alivea powerful story of the manhunt for a deranged killer in the American Southwest. Living in London while his wife serves as a military attaché at the American Embassy, recently retired Santa Fe Police Chief Kevin Kerney gets an early morning phone call that changes everything and sends him hurrying home to his New Mexico ranch. Riley Burke, his partner in a horsetraining enterprise, has been mowed down on KerneyÂs doorstep by an escaped prisoner cutting a murderous swath through New Mexico. As the killings mount, Kerney teams up with his half-Apache son, Lieutenant Clayton Istee of the Lincoln County SheriffÂs Department, to hunt for a psychotic murderer with a growing appetite for blood, who has no intention to be taken alive.
Author Notes
Michael McGarrity is a former deputy sheriff for Santa Fe County, he established the first Sex Crimes Unit. He also served as an instructor at the new Mexico Law Enforcement Academy and as an investigator for the New Mexico Public Defender's Office. He lives in Santa Fe.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
McGarrity's 12th Kevin Kerney novel (after Death Song) displays the author's usual fine sense of place along with an unusual amount of gore. When escaped convict Craig Larson goes on a rampage that includes the murder of Riley Burke, a neighbor and business partner of former Santa Fe police chief Kerney, that's enough to bring Kerney, at least temporarily, out of retirement--and back from London, where Kerney's wife is a U.S. embassy employee. Larson's crime spree becomes more deadly as he tacks back and forth as far south as Texas and north almost to Colorado. Kerney, acting as a special investigator with the New Mexico State Police, and his lawman son, Clayton Istee, partner up for the statewide manhunt. McGarrity is particularly adept at portraying multijurisdictional investigations. While this isn't a good starting place for newcomers, series fans will relish the deepening relationship of Kerney and Istee, who only recently learned they were father and son. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
McGarrity's Kevin Kerney series, set mainly in New Mexico, mixes several elements: the early novels combined razor-sharp procedural detail with a gripping noirish edge, while the last few swapped the noir for a full-palette portrayal of a cop's domestic life. This time we're back on the edge. Kerney, retired as Sante Fe's chief of police, is living in London with wife Sarah, an Army colonel posted to Britain, and son Patrick when he learns that his New Mexico partner in a horse-raising business has been murdered at his ranch. It's back to Santa Fe for Kerney, where he accepts a temporary assignment with the state police and joins the hunt for the killer. McGarrity juggles point of view here, moving from Kerney and his Apache son, Clayton, also a cop, as they follow the trail, to the killer himself, a lethal but oddly introspective sociopath right out of a Stephen Hunter novel. Readers who favor McGarrity wearing black rather than an apron will be well pleased by this strong return to his earlier style.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Just when you think you've caught up with him on the curve, Charlie Huston drives right off the cliff, landing on a road no one else could see. After writing three nervy crime novels about a bartender named Henry Thompson, who gets mixed up with the New York mob, Huston veered into a series featuring a vampire private eye. Along the way, he also started a comic-book series and knocked out a coming-of-age novel. Even if you stuck with Huston on these daredevil loops, you couldn't have anticipated THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH (Ballantine, $25). The story is narrated by Webster Fillmore Goodhue, a California slacker who resembles the author's other antiheroes in that his fast mouth, troubled conscience and well-guarded sensitivity alienate him from the quasi-criminal types he runs around with. But while the boyish Web may resemble other contemporary Candides, the job that snaps him out of his existential lethargy is shockingly original. After being pressured by the friend he's been sponging off (a lovably slovenly tattoo artist named Chev), Web goes to work as a professional cleaner - but not 'our conventional mop-slopper. He's what's known in the trade as "a trauma cleaner," putting on a hazmat suit and scraping up the blood and gore after someone commits suicide ("the bigger the ..., the bigger the mess") or dies alone in a "festering den" of his fifth. While this nasty work functions as a vivid metaphor for the cleanup of Web's own emotional debris (it soothes him to make things look normal, "make things the way they were"), the grim reality of his occupation is plenty interesting on its own terms, and Huston works the disgust angle for all it's worth. Despite his cleverness in engineering a treacherous romance for Web, along with "same kind of dead-body-cleanup range war" between the good-guy Clean Team and their thuggish rivals at a company called Aftershock, Huston isn't as noir as he probably wants to be. Web has a sentimental streak that would shame Dickens, and the miseries he's had to bear are absurdly overstated. But the outlandish characters - from Web's trippy parents to the noble soul who trusts him with a job - are brazen originals, and the dialogue is the roar of a death-defying talent. A private eye is expected to be whip-smart and tough as nails, but if the guy isn't likable, he's D.O.A. as a genre hero. So it's nice to note that Vlodek Elstrom (known as Dek), a shamus from a tumbledown town in northern Illinois who was introduced by Jack Fredrickson in "A Safe Place for Dying," has lost none of his initial appeal in its sequel, HONESTLY DEAREST, YOU'RE DEAD (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95). With his rich back story as a disgraced and discredited (and subsequently divorced) investigator, Dek has plenty of baggage to haul around. ... mention endearing quirks like setting up shop in a stone turret (the only part of his grandfather's mansion that was ever completed) or a misanthropic loathing of the chain stores that are devouring the American landscape. ("Someday, they'll move all the Starbucks inside the Wal-Marts," he predicts, "and that will mark the last time mankind will see the sun.") But none of this drollery interferes with his investigation into the mystery of why an unknown woman named him executor of her estate, or why she died in such a brutal manner. Although Dek can be a cutup, his explanation for his obsessive search for the truth - "It was about respect" - reveals the bedrock of decency that makes him a seriously good guy. In the iconography of thrillers, a serial killer can be psychologically complex as well as gruesomely entertaining. But you can't beat a spree killer for raw action, and in DEAD OR ALIVE (Dutton, $25.95), Michael McGarrity has produced a true monster in Craig Larson. After Larson slaughters some half-dozen people in the sparsely populated rangelands of northern New Mexico, including a youth minister from a Bible camp, it finally dawns on him that "he just flat-out enjoyed killing people." But when he shoots a cowboy who worked at a ranch owned by Kevin Kerney, retired chief of the Santa Fe police department, the manic Larson sets off a major manhunt. The procedures for trapping a spree killer are less analytical and more picturesque than those for catching a serial killer, and McGarrity, a former deputy sheriff, knows the drill. He also knows the territory, which he portrays in a blunt, invigorating style that, even after a dozen books, still feels fresh. What's winter without a body in the snow? In MURDER AT DEVIATION JUNCTION (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, paper, $13.95), Andrew Martin's Edwardian railway detective, Jim Stringer, is returning home from the north of England when a blizzard strands his train at a remote station just long enough for him to get involved in the mystery of a dead body found nearby. Issues of politics and class make it tough for Jim to pursue his case, which involves an elite group of businessmen who maintained a private club train until they mysteriously began dying off. The story is solid, but it's the extraordinary period atmosphere that elevates both this novel and this series. Whether he's describing a long night journey to a hellish blast furnace or a quick run to the city on the early-morning milk train, Martin writes with intense feeling for the beauty and dangers of life as (ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes obscured text omitted.) was lived on the iron road. The narrator of Charlie Huston's latest novel is a California slacker with a fast mouth and a troubled conscience.
Kirkus Review
ExSanta Fe Police Chief Kevin Kerney comes out of retirement to track a monster. Craig Larson is a psychopath's psychopath. Remorseless and relentless, he'll kill anything that moves. Or not. And whether he does or doesn't in any given situation is both unpredictable and inexplicable, since he himself has no clue. On his way to prison, Larson overpowers a guard, steals his weapon, stabs him in the eyea deliberately selected targetand launches a one-man guerrilla attack on much of New Mexico. Early in this maniacal murder spree, he blows away young Riley Burke, a partner in Kevin Kerney's ranching operation. At the time, Santa Fe's former chief of police, famous in law-enforcement circles as a fearsome combination of bloodhound, bulldog and elephant, is living in London with his wife Sara, Army colonel and military attach to the American embassy. Learning of Riley's death, Kerney returns at once to New Mexico, where he joins Lieutenant Clayton Istee and just about every other police officer in the state in a manhunt that has "dead or alive" written all over it. By this time, Larson's homicidal rampage has developed a much sharper focus. He wants to kill cops. Cops want to kill him. It doesn't get any more basic than that. McGarrity (Death Song, 2008, etc.) plays to one of his core strengthsthe police proceduralbut the human drama, another of his usual strengths, is muted here. Fans will miss it. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
McGarrity has a long list of solid mysteries in his Kevin Kerney series. Unfortunately, the 12th (after Death Song) is not up to the same standard. Like all the Kerney books, it is set in New Mexico, peopled with a cast of likable characters, and features McGarrity's crisp and colorful writing. However, readers familiar with Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men (2005) or the Coen brothers' 2007 movie version will recognize the plot of the madman roaming the countryside and ruthlessly killing anyone who gets in his way. McGarrity's latest is as well done as McCarthy's so that those who haven't read No Country may be satisfied with the story of ex-sheriff Kerney, his army wife, and their family. Yet even McGarrity's knack for using the intriguing New Mexico setting as an integral aspect of the plot cannot redeem this relentless bloodbath of a novel. Coming so soon after No Country, it just seems derivative. Buy only where the series is popular.-Ann Forister, Roseville, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
