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The Resurrectionists

by Michael Collins

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I was blown away by this literate thriller. Michael Collins again captures the dark side of small town America. It is a story of homecoming and confronting the past but ultimately hopeful. There are so many thrillers set in the underbelly of large American cities that it is refreshing to read a story ripe with psychological tension and characters whose shared history goes back for generations. When Frank Cassidy was five, his parents died in a house fire in a remote Michigan town. When his Uncle is shot by a mysterious stranger thirty years later , Frank returns to the town seeking answers about his past.
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bhowell | Aug 27, 2009 |

Psychological/suspense story about Frank Cassidy, a young man who witnessed his parents death in a fire when he was five. Having blocked the memory from his head, he begins to pick up the pieces of his life marrying a woman with an ex-boyfriend on death row and raising two children. But his past comes back to haunt him when he hears that his uncle who raised him has been murdered. Now he must retrace the past in order to find out who is the killer. I liked the idea of this book. Intersting twists on how we perceive the past. The characters were intriguing though a bit stereotypical. But for some reason the book left me feeling a bit flat. It seemed to me like this was a really good book that just hadn't reached it's final draft form.

theresak1975 | Nov 13, 2007 |

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Amazon.com (ISBN 075381370X, Paperback)

The Resurrectionists, Irish writer Michael Collins's follow-up to his Booker Prize-nominated The Keepers of Truth, is a thriller that bubbles up from the tawdry stew of its central character's fringe existence. Frank Cassidy is a clinically depressed, all-but-impoverished New Jersey man who receives word that his uncle Ward (who raised Frank after his parents were killed) has died. Frank's reaction is telling: perhaps there's a piece of Ward's Michigan farm that has been willed to him. Traveling in a succession of stolen cars, Frank gets to his snowbound destination and finds that Ward's death is shrouded in mystery; worse, Frank is implicated in the crime.

Collins has written a significantly ambitious work here that wants to be more literary than its genre conventions typically require. This makes for a novel with many memorable elements but a blurry reading experience overall. Still, one has to appreciate the author's insight. Strategically set in 1979, the story's emotional landscape is profoundly provocative and disturbing, a photo album of sociocultural exhaustion. The characters are burdened by sundry fallout effects of Vietnam, Watergate, recession, and mutable family structures. Cumulative dread and regression fill the air. In such a setting, a fellow like Frank, somewhere between ordinary life and the netherworld of crime, between failure and redemption, is a consummate protagonist. --Tom Keogh

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:19 -0400)

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