EW review: Engrossing 'Devil'
Diabolically gifted Hayder spins exceedingly creepy tale
By Jennifer Reese
Entertainment Weekly
(Entertainment Weekly) -- Lesson learned from Mo Hayder's dazzling "The Devil of Nanking": Never, ever steal from a yakuza kingpin, especially if he employs a she-male bodyguard called Nurse.
One of the characters in this exceedingly creepy book tries this, and soon his entrails are strung through the trees like party streamers.
In Hayder's third novel, the diabolically gifted British author spins a fascinating mystery from the legacy of Japanese atrocities during World War II. Grey, a troubled young Englishwoman, comes to Tokyo to track down an elderly Chinese professor, Shi Chongming, who is rumored to have film footage of particularly grisly Japanese war crimes.
Chongming makes her a deal: Grey can screen the film after she infiltrates the inner circle of an octogenarian gangster whose security chief, the aforementioned Nurse, wears stiletto heels and pencil skirts and does her best work with a butcher knife.
Hayder alternates between Chongming's wrenching account of his experiences in 1930s Nanking and Grey's unwholesome adventures as a hostess in contemporary Tokyo, the two narratives becoming more and more engrossing as they gradually, ghoulishly intertwine.
EW Grade: A
'Oblivion,' Peter Abrahams
Reviewed by Jennifer Reese
You know you're holding a first-rate thriller when you take it with you in the car to read at stoplights.
Peter Abrahams' marvelous "Oblivion" tweaks the conventions of the Michael Connelly-style whodunit to create a novel that is at once classically suspenseful and completely fresh.
In the first few chapters, Nick Petrov comes on like the stereotypical world-weary L.A. private eye with a broken marriage and a tough/tender heart. The Santa Ana winds are blowing when a provocatively dressed woman hires him to track down her missing teenage daughter. He quickly finds the drugged girl and is escorting her to the hospital when suddenly Abrahams explodes the plot.
To describe the details would spoil the pleasure. In short: Petrov loses his memory, loses the girl and for the delicious remainder of this strangely lovely book tries to find her again, piecing together a bizarre and macabre mystery using faculties (like intuition and empathy) that weren't previously in his repertoire.
In short, punchy chapters, Abrahams strips away the brittle veneer of this stock character to reveal a confused new Petrov, off-kilter, sweet and slow. His reflections are funny and often a little stupid, even as the twisty, ingenious horror story turns out to be anything but.
EW Grade: A
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