Publisher's Weekly
Ambitious and intermittently funny, this debut satire sends up both detective and sci-fi genres with its story of simian mayhem.
Publishers Weekly
Ambitious and intermittently funny, this debut satire sends up both detective and sci-fi genres with its story of simian mayhem. Dutch Flowers is a sad sack investigator charged with solving a murder at the Acteon Corporation, a Los Angeles biotech firm. Acteon breeds and studies genetically enhanced chimpanzees. One of its subjects, 99, has apparently been murdered by a fellow ape, and Dutch's job is to figure out which of the other chimps is the perp. Dutch himself is a former CIA assassin whose mission went spectacularly-and famously-wrong during the Gulf War. Now Dutch is being hounded by an Iraqi extortionist, which is why he decides to accept the assignment. Pryor's premise is a winner, spawning some hilarious deadpan observations ("I managed to establish the whereabouts of 35 chimps during the time period in which 99's murder had taken place") as well as inspired sequences, including a flashback in which Dutch and fellow CIA assassins interrupt a cohort of Saddam's prostitutes on their way to work, only to find that the women are more resourceful than the U.S.'s best black ops. But for every lean, hard-bitten comment, there's a counterpart bloated by too much exposition or studied hipness ("The bungled bid for the life of the dictator the American motorist loved to hate would make the fall of Saigon look like the wrap party for a B-movie"). One can only hope for more consistent work from the talented Pryor in the future. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Unfortunate shenanigans involving monkeys, Saddam Hussein, and secret research labs. In the future, every book will look like this—or so the publisher assures us, claiming that we’re in for the "futuristic satire" of a Kurt Vonnegut, the "edgy neo-noir" of a Jonathan Lethem, and the "maniacal narrative charge" of a Chuck Palahniuk. All of which is patently untrue. Pryor’s genre-blender debut centers on Doug Flowers, one of the military assassins who’d been assigned to Operation Slay Dracula ("Dracula" being Saddam Hussein) back in the Gulf War, Part One. After laying waste to a multitude of Saddam look-alikes, he failed in his mission, and now all those who worked in "Dracula" have been killed off, one by one, by Saddam’s people back in the US, except for Flowers. While he’s being chased down by his assigned killer (who in this kind of book is, of course, a gorgeous pre-op transsexual named Mr. Wonderful), he’s also working as a pretty lousy private eye and investigating some weird goings-on at a monkey research lab in present-day or near-future Los Angeles. It looks as though one of the monkeys has killed a couple of the other primates, and, for reasons left mostly to the imagination, Flowers is considered the man to get to the bottom of the mystery. Meantime, his wife—who knows neither about his "Dracula" past nor his Mr. Wonderful present—appears to be having an affair, and there’s a comely scientist who seems to have an unhealthy attachment to her research chimp and who also seems to be attracted to Flowers. All of this is related in prose that attempts to destabilize the reader by freely jumping about in time. The result is simply confusion: transitions from scene toscene are missing or clumsy, and a coherent flow of action and dialogue fails to emerge. Agent: Jennifer Carlson/Dunow & Carlson
