Jack of spades : a tale of suspense /

STARRING IN A Jeffery Deaver thriller isn't all it's cracked up to be. Despite their sterling reputations, his sleuths are in constant danger of being outclassed by their preternaturally cunning adversaries. This is what happens in SOLITUDE CREEK (Grand Central, $28) when Kathryn Dance, an agent with the California Bureau of Investigation, takes on Antioch March, a newfangled killer who likes to scare people into causing their own deaths. "He plays with perceptions, sensations, panic," Dance discovers, leaving the actual killing to his victims themselves. A small, contained fire outside the Solitude Creek roadhouse, a tractor-trailer blocking the exit doors and a single phone call to raise the false alarm - that's all it takes for 200 people to turn on one another in an "animal frenzy" to get out of the club. Marveling at the deadly efficiency of his own work, the man who caused this chaos reflects on how "people could erase a million years of evolution in seconds." This crafty fiend is partial to witty "event" homicides like the book party at the Bay View hall that he orchestrates into a scene of mass hysteria, with guests crashing through windows and hurling themselves into the sea. But he'll also indulge in more modest entertainments, finding a nice viewing spot on a cliff at Monterey Bay and waiting for unwary tourists to venture too far out on the rocks, only to be swept away by a churning wave. Dance manages to deflect some of March's homicidal ambitions, but although he calls her "the Great Strategist," her tactics are nowhere near as ingenious (or as droll) as his own machinations. While Dance may not be able to compete with a flamboyant showoff like March, she's excellent as the calm but constantly moving right hand that Deaver uses to distract us from what his busy left hand is doing. Applying classic principles of indirection, he gives her an important organized-crime case to keep track of, along with single-mother headaches caused by her 10-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son, who have picked this moment to act out their growing pains. Mom needs all her wits about her right now if she hopes to foil one of Deaver's most diabolical villains. JUST WHEN YOU think you've got her all figured out, Joyce Carol Oates sneaks up from behind and confounds you yet again. She does it with a wicked flourish in JACK OF SPADES (Mysterious Press, $24), a "tale of suspense" written in the voice of Andrew J. Rush, an author of "best-selling mystery-suspense novels with a touch of the macabre," who is proud to be known as "the gentleman's Stephen King." Oates gives him a nice wife, a nice family, a nice house in the New Jersey suburbs and the carefully modulated accents of an arrogant stuffed shirt. That changes drastically when he speaks in the more assertive voice of his pseudonymous alter ego, Jack of Spades, who furtively writes "cruder, more visceral, more frankly horrific" potboilers that earn little money and attract an unstable fan base, but gratify a deeply felt need. Oates writes sparingly about the trauma that gave birth to the now rampaging Jack. It's only when Rush is sued for plagiarism by an unknown author that his repressed guilt flares up - irrational, no doubt, but not unfamiliar to writers who "steal" the identities of living people as they give birth to characters of their own creation, including monsters like Jack. A COZY VILLAGE mystery needn't be quaint, and in his blissful novels about Bruno Courrèges, the police chief in the provincial French town of St. Denis, in the Dordogne, Martin Walker usually manages to balance the idyllic charms of his fictional village with substantive issues of concern to Bruno's neighbors. But he seems to have lost that sense of balance in THE CHILDREN RETURN (Knopf, $24.95), with an overstuffed political plot about killers from a radical mosque in Toulouse sent to find "the Engineer," an autistic local Muslim boy with a talent for bomb making. That should be enough excitement for his little town, but Walker also digs into the history of Vichy France for a subplot about Jewish children given sanctuary in St. Denis during World War II. It's time for the grape harvest in this lush valley, but Bruno is far too busy chasing terrorists to devote much time to food and drink and the troubled history of this beautiful region. THE NECESSARY DEATH OF LEWIS WINTER (Mulholland, paper, $15), the first book in Malcolm Mackay's brutal but elegantly constructed Glasgow Trilogy, features a gifted young hit man named Calum MacLean, who is hired by a gangland boss to fill in while his main gunman, Frank MacLeod, recovers from hip replacement surgery. Frank is on his feet again in the second book, how a gunman says GOODBYE (Mulholland, paper, $15), and very happy to be working again. ("Sunshine retirement is for other people. He wants the rain of Glasgow. The tension of the job. The thrill of it. That's his life. Oh, it's so good to be back.") But in THE SUDDEN ARRIVAL OF VIOLENCE (Mulholland, paper, $15) we return to Calum as he weighs the odds of getting out of the profession - alive, that is. Mackay's novels aren't easy to read. He writes short, brisk sentences, blunt and direct, almost clinical. "This isn't a gentleman's club, after all," we're told. "This is business." You either like his affectless style or you don't. I do.

Andrew J. Rush is a successful crime fiction writer and long-married father of three grown children who lives with discipline and dignity on a lovely New Jersey estate in a beautifully appointed old mansion that includes a secret cellar library. Naturally, given that this is a deft and wily psychological thriller by the fathomlessly imaginative Oates (Daddy Love, 2013), Rush has something to hide. In addition to carefully and reliably crafting his bestselling, mannerly mysteries, he has also been furiously scribbling, in clandestine, late-night, alcohol-stoked marathons, poisonously angry, wretchedly twisted, and violent noir published under the pseudonym, Jack of Spades. Andrew is already struggling to maintain this assiduously compartmentalized life when he is summoned to court to face an inexplicable charge of plagiarism. Surely his accuser, a wealthy recluse who has also sued Stephen King, is a nut case, so why is Andrew freaking out? In this lashed-to-your-seat tale of mental disintegration, Oates conducts a chilling anatomy of a literary genius run dangerously amok and a cruelly parasitic marriage while also paying witty homage to literary horror. Delectably sharp, shivery fun.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist

Joe Barrett has a great time bringing to life this twisted tale of a man's fall into madness and murder. Andrew J. Rush is a celebrated literary novelist, with enough critical accolades and money to satisfy any author. It would appear that Rush reigns happily atop the elusive mountain of publishing success, but he has a secret. Under the pseudonym Jack of Spades, he writes a series of ultraviolent pulp novels that are unrivaled in their depictions of visceral depravity. But family drama, professional jealousy, and accusations of plagiarism lead Rush to hear the strident, demanding voice of Jack, and that voice is pushing him down a dark, deadly path in his own life. Reader Barrett sets just the right tone with this first-person page-turner. He gives Rush a perfectly calm sense of reasonableness, but at the same time his reading nicely conveys the fragility of the character's sanity as it begins to slowly crack and break. It is a well-textured performance that pulls the listener in and never lets go. A Grove/Atlantic/Mysterious hardcover. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Andrew J. Rush has a loving family, and his 28 mystery novels have achieved both critical and commercial success. But he also secretly writes the kind of books he wouldn't even admit to reading: the crude, violent Jack of Spades novels. When Rush receives a court summons that accuses him not only of breaking and entering but also of plagiarism, his finely balanced life begins to teeter. There is a bit of an Edgar Allan Poe influence in Oates's story as she explores the fine line between madness and genius. -VERDICT Read with the proper edge and disbelief in turn by Joe Barrett, this audiobook is recommended for horror and mystery fans. ["This tale of suspense makes for another high-caliber Oatesian outing, displaying flair, noir sophistication, and King-like flourishes": LJ 4/1/15 starred review of the Mysterious: Grove Atlantic hc.]-Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A mystery writer slowly becomes subsumed by his dark alter ego in Oates' tale of literary madness.Andrew J. Rush has made a name for himself and more than a comfortable living as a successful mystery writer. He's published 28 novels, and an early review even called him "the gentleman's Stephen King." But behind the happily married family man with three grown children who's the favorite son of his small New Jersey town lies a secret, ultraviolent series of noir thrillers Rush writes under the pseudonym "Jack of Spades." No onenot even his doting wife, Irinaknows about Jack: Rush dashes the books off in secret and sends them to a separate agent and publisher. Despite its grisly content, the series sells modestly well. Rush's two worlds seem to coexist in parallel harmony until the day his daughter, Julia, finds a copy of Jack's A Kiss Before Killing in Rush's office and decides to read it. Soon after, Rush is hit with a bizarre plagiarism lawsuit from C.W. Haider, a local woman claiming he not only copied her ideas, but physically stole her work. In an enjoyable bit of metafiction, Oates (The Sacrifice, 2015, etc.) depicts Haider as particularly litigious when it comes to the literary set: she's sued Stephen King, John Updike, and Peter Straub, among others. While the mild-mannered Rush is merely indignant at being accused, Jack of Spades wants revenge, and so begins his slow descent into madness. With its homages to Poe, from "The Black Cat" to "The Tell-Tale Heart," and the horror masters Jack of Spades so admires, this latest unsettling and chilling thriller from Oates does not disappoint. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.