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The Last Picture Show meets Veronica Mars, as directed by Sam Peckinpah. When we first meet KRISTIN VAN DIJK, in the fifties-set Baby Shark (2006), she's a mere slip of a gal, just seventeen (you know what I mean), who's forced to watch the murder of her pool hustling daddy and two other men by a gang of sore-loser bikers in a Texas pool hall. She's then beaten, raped and left for dead. Kristin bides her time, learning how to protect herself and working on her game, eventually earning the nickname "Baby Shark." A year later, she hits the road, hustling pool and searching for revenge with the help of private eye Otis Millet, who's been hired by the father of one of the other victims. They find it, in a predictably blood-spattered climax that's just bound to be multiplex-bound. By the 2007 sequel, Baby Shark's Beaumont Blues, Kristin's calmed down enough to set herself up as a private eye, working for Otis' agency in Fort Worth. The book starts off with a typical wandering daughter job, a missing Texas oil heiress whose father has just died, but soon enough explodes -- right on schedule -- into violence ("with an [even] higher body count than the first," one Amazon reviewer gleefully reports), with people getting beaten up and blown away all over the place. Fortunately Fate's tight taut prose style, eye for every seedy detail and snappy pacing goes a long way to making it all work. Author Fate has -- perhaps not surprisingly --written for television and film and, aa Hollywood F/X technician,has won an Oscar for Technical Achievement. A former Marine, he's studied at the Sorbonne, roughnecked in the oilfields of Oklahoma, fashion-modeled in NYC, and been a chef at a chi-chi LA eatery, according to his bio. More adventures featuring Kristin are planned.. UNDER OATH
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Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. | Home | Detectives A-L M-Z | Film | Radio | Television | Web Comics | Comics | FAQs | Got a gripe. Give us a call. We never sleep.
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