Night train

Review by Booklist Review

When one of Britain's leading novelists, no stranger to the dark side of human experience, writes a hard-boiled detective novel starring an American homicide cop, heads are going to turn. They've already turned in Amis' own country, where a Daily Telegraph columnist recently counseled readers on what to say about the book at cocktail parties, and you can expect the same kind of buzz here. The tale is narrated by a foulmouthed, politically incorrect female cop, Mike Hoolihan, who investigates the apparent suicide of Jennifer Rockwell, a golden girl who happens to be Mike's friend. Jennifer's father, Mike's longtime colleague and mentor, hopes Mike will prove that the suicide was really murder, but the deeper she probes, the more murky matters become. Why was Jennifer secretly taking lithium? What sent her seemingly perfect life so tragically far off course? Amis masterfully uses the essential conceit of the detective novel--the assumption that truth is ultimately fathomable--to facilitate his headlong journey into the heart of darkness. The more Mike learns about Jennifer, the less she knows. And like Kurtz in Conrad's tale, the vision of meaninglessness at the end of the road throws Mike off her own moorings. Fans of the conventional mystery will have little tolerance for this sort of thing, but readers willing to unhinge themselves from formula and free-fall into Amis' genre nightmare will experience something very special. A piece of advice: don't even try to talk about it at cocktail parties. --Bill Ott

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Amis certainly never writes the same book twice. After major efforts like London Fields and The Information and smaller ingenuities like Time's Arrow comes this extremely slender attempt at a dark American crime story. His narrator is a hefty, tough-talking policewoman called Mike Hoolihan, who strains credulity right off by announcing herself as "a police" and asserting that this is how cops refer to themselves. In an imaginary American city that seems to be a mix of Chicago and Boston but isn't really either, she has been called in by an old buddy, a senior police official, to investigate the apparent suicide of his beautiful daughter, Jennifer Rockwell. Jennifer, a brilliant astrophysicist (another chance for Amis to display his fascination with the galaxies), seemed to have everything to live for, yet she apparently shot herself through the head three times. (Is this possible? Yes, according to Mike's research). Her lover is a possible murder suspect, and so is a man who may have been another, if improbable, party in her life. But as Mike digs, it becomes apparent that Jennifer was a much stranger person than anyone knew. It's not exactly a rivetingly original story, and Amis's echt tough American narrative style, though clearly the work of a clever ventriloquist, is unconvincing. The length suggests this was no more than an experiment, and it can only be described as an unsuccessful one: readers in search of the Amis they admire will have to wait. Author tour. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Jennifer Rockwell is dead, apparently a suicide, but her father the cop doesn't believe it. Was her odd behavior before dying (taking lithium, visiting bars) a sign that she really was flipping out, or was she leaving clues to her killer's identity? Since this intriguing sort-of mystery is by the brilliant, acidulous Amis (The Information, LJ 5/1/95), don't expect anything standard. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by School Library Journal Review

YA‘"Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness." Detective Mike Hoolihan is a case-hardened policewoman, but this case is different. The dead woman is Jennifer Rockwell, the daughter of Mike's friend (and boss), Colonel Tom Rockwell, head of criminal investigation. Even though all the evidence points to suicide, Colonel Tom asks Mike to take another look. Everyone agrees that Jennifer had everything; she was beautiful, a brilliant astrophysicist with a promising career, in love with a professor at the university. Why suicide? As Mike probes the secrets of the deceased woman's life, she is forced to re-examine her own, and the decision she makes at the end of her investigation says as much about her as it does about Jennifer, or Colonel Tom. The author's portrayal of the conflicts and complexities of a criminal investigation is utterly convincing, the dialogue is authentic, and the writing is both spare and powerful. YAs who like detective stories will find themselves pulled into this investigation.‘Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Amis, who seems to be turning himself into a British Thomas Berger, continues his twisty tour of formulaic genres (The Information, 1995, etc.) with his most deadpan pastiche yet: the police investigation of an impossible suicide. Mike Hoolihan, a beefy female detective in an unnamed ""second-echelon American city,"" is called back from Asset Forfeiture to Homicide to break the news of his daughter's death to Colonel Tom Rockwell, the grand old man of the police department. Jennifer Rockwell was an astrophysicist who had everything to live for--brains, looks, the world's best lover, and unlimited career horizons--but who put a gun in her mouth anyway. Colonel Tom, of course, can't believe it's suicide, and asks Mike (so completely Jennifer's opposite that she's constantly mistaken for a man on the phone) to follow the case. She doesn't have to follow any further than the postmortem to see that Jennifer evidently shot herself three times--laying the case as wide open as her corpse. If Jennifer didn't kill herself, who murdered her? Her gentle live-in, philosophy-of-science prof Trader Faulkner? Bax Denziger, her bemused boss in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Institute of Physical Problems? Am Debs, the jovial, roundheeled traveling salesman she'd hooked up with? And if Jennifer did manage to kill herself, why did she do it--who was the person inside who made her pull the trigger? Mike follows up a glittering trail of modish cultural rubble--Jennifer's surprising use of lithium, her maliciously erratic recent work at Terrestrial Magnetism, her careful annotations in her copy of Making Sense of Suicide--to produce the latest in a stream of anti-detective stories that goes back all the way to Billy Budd. Amis's hypnotic way with a phrase produces a collage asparkle with bits of broken glass--and perhaps the most jaundiced, knowing book ever written about ignorance. Quite an accomplishment. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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The Psychological Autopsy Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness. You won't get there so quick, not by natural means. You buy your ticket and you climb on board. That ticket costs everything you have. But it's just a one-way. This train takes you into the night, and leaves you there. It's the night train. Now I feel that someone is inside of me, like an intruder, her flashlight playing. Jennifer Rockwell is inside of me, trying to reveal what I dont want to see. Suicide is a mind-body problem that ends violently and without any winner. I've got to slow this shit down. I've got to slow it all down. What I'm doing here, with my ballpoint, my tape recorder, and my PC--its the same as what Paulie No was doing in the ME's office, with his clamp, his electric saw, his trayfull of knives. Only we call it the psychological autopsy. I can do this. I am trained to do this. Recall: For a time, though only a short time, and only once to my face, they used to call me "Suicide Mike." This was thought to be too offensive, even for downtown, and they soon abandoned it. Offensive not to the poor bastards found slumped in carseats in sealed garages, or half submerged in crimson bathtubs. Offensive to me: It meant I was fool enough to take any bum call. Because a suicide didn't do a damn thing for your solve rate or your overtime. On the midnights the phone would ring and Mac or O'Boye would be pouting over the cupped receiver and saying, How about you handle this one, Mike? Its an s.d. and I need dough for my mother's operation. A suspicious death--not the murder he craves. For little-boy-lost here also believes that suicides are an insult to his forensic gifts. He wants a regular perpetrator . Not some schmuck who, a century ago, would have been buried at the four-corners, under a heap of rocks, with a stake through his heart. Then for a time--a short time, as I say--they'd hold out the phone and deadpan, It's for you, Mike. Its a suicide. And then I'd yell at them. But they weren' t wrong, maybe. Maybe it moved and compelled me more than it did them, to crouch under the bridge on the riverbank, to stand in a rowhouse stairwell while a shadow rotated slowly on the wall, and think about those who hate their own lives and choose to defy the terrible providence of God. As part of my job I completed, as many others did, the course called "Suicide: Harsh Conclusions," at Pete, and followed that up, again on city time, with the refresher lecture series on "Patterns of Suicide," at CC. I came to know the graphs and diagrams of suicide, their pie segments, their concentric circles, their color codes, their arrows, their snakes and ladders. With my Suicide Prevention tours, back in the Forty-Four, plus the hundred-some suicides I worked in the Show, I came to know not just the physical aftermaths but the basic suicide picture, ante mortem. And Jennifer doesn't belong here. She doesn't belong. I have my folders out on the couch, this Sunday morning. Going through my notes to see what I got: -In all cultures, risk of suicide increases with age. But not steadily. The diagonal graph-line seems to have a flattish middle section, like a flight of stairs with a landing. Statistically (for what stats are worth around here), if you make it into your twenties, you're on level ground until the risk bump of the midlife. Jennifer was twenty-eight. - About 50 percent of suicides have tried before. They are parasuicides or pseudosuicides. About 75 percent give warning. About 90 percent have histories of egression--histories of escape. Jennifer hadn't tried before. So far as I know, she did not give warning. All her life she saw things through. - Suicide is very, very means-dependent. Take the means away (toxic domestic gas, for instance) and the rate plummets. Jennifer didn't need gas. Like many another American, she owned a gun. These are my notes. What about their notes, and what percentage leave them? Some studies say 70 percent, others say 30. Suicide notes, it is assumed, are often spirited away by the decedents loved ones. Suicides, as we have seen, are often camouflaged--smudged, snowed. Axiom: Suicides generate false data. Jennifer, apparently, did not leave a suicide note. But I know she wrote one. I just feel this. It may run in families but it's not inherited. It is a pattern, or a configuration. It's not a predisposition. If your mother kills herself, it wont help, and it opens a door . . . Here are some other do's and dont's. Or dont's, anyway: Don't work around death. Don't work around pharmaceuticals. Don't be an immigrant. Don't be a German, just off the boat. Don't be Romanian. Don't be Japanese. Don't live where the sun doesn't shine. Don't be an adolescent homosexual: One in three will attempt. Don't be a nonagenarian Los Angelean. Don't be an alcoholic. It's suicide on the installment plan, anyway. Don't be a schizophrenic. Disobey those voices in your head. Don't be depressed. Lighten up. Don't be Jennifer Rockwell. And don't be a man. Don't be a man, whatever you do. Tony Silvera was, of course, talking through his ass when he said that suicide was a "babe thing." To the contrary, suicide is a dude thing. Attempting is a woman thing: Theyre more than twice as likely to do that. Completing is a man thing: They're more than twice as likely to do that. There's only one day in the year when its safer to be male. Mother's Day. Mother's Day is the day for felo de se . How come? I wonder. Is it the all-you-can-eat brunch at the Quality Inn? No. The suicides are the women who skipped the lunch. They're the women who skipped the kids. Dont be Jennifer Rockwell. The question is: But why not? Excerpted from Night Train by Martin Amis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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