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Summary: Are we speaking of the same book?
Review: Don't get me wrong. I am as big a fan of this particular genre as they come, and an award-winning media professional. It was based on these fine reviews that I rushed out to purchase this book. While his writing craft is alive and well, the author repeatedly asks us to suspend our disbelief near the end, in order to further several key story twists. Can you imagine this happening in The Maltese Falcon, for example? Then, we are handed a reverse Deus Ex Machina ending that is totally out of character with the protagonist (if you care to call this unshapen character that). Believe me when I tell you that I was extremely disappointed because I wanted to like this book. But it is a real stretch to compare this story to Fargo or A Simple Plan. Ice alone does not a good read make!
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Summary: Not Dorothy's Kansas
Review: I don't think this is the place she would have expected to get back to by clicking her heels three times. Lots of sex (which nobody seems to be enjoying very much} and violence. Wonderful use of the irony of Christmas celebration as the pitiable, half-way likeable, alcoholic, ex-lawyer goes around the strip joints and porno shops and rackets he runs for the sinister boss he is trying to double-cross. He's risking his life to escape with a half-share of $250,000. Tension builds up about whether her will make it.
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Summary: Knockout Noir
Review: I have to love a writer who can tell a great story in under 300 pages. And make no mistake, this is a great story. Mean, lowdown and dirty, with a cast of characters who have not one redeeming quality between them. It all takes place in Wichita on Christmas Eve in 1979. Charlie is a shady lawyer who, with his partner, Vic, has stolen enough money from their mob connected boss to leave town and start a new, better life. While Charlie waits to hook up with his partner, who has the money, and to catch his plane, he wanders aimlessly around town in a snowstorm, visiting the strip clubs owned by his boss, drinking too much, and visiting his angry ex-wife and the children he has always neglected. Phillips captures the lonely, dreary lives of the strippers, drunks and employees of the seedy clubs and bars still open on a snowy Christmas Eve. There's an incriminating photo, a package full of money, and lots of double dealing. Charlie is a man who has some good intentions and impulses, but generally manages to overcome them. It's a violent book, funny and ironic, too. Phillips creates an atmospheric world of lonliness, brutality and sleaze. It's a stunning debut. I can't wait for the follow-up.
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Summary: A Clever Story, Very Well Told
Review: I recently read Scott Phillips' "Cottonwood" based on a favorable review and enjoyed it a great deal. As often happens when I like a newly-discovered author, I go back and check some of his earlier work. Thus, I found "Ice Harvest" and I'm glad I did.
It's a very slight work, both in terms of length and plot. Clocking in at barely 200 pages, it tells the tale of a mob lawyer about to hit the road after scamming a large amount of money. The story is old but the way Phillips tells it is fresh and new. He doesn't insult the reader by spelling everything out up front; he lets the story unfold leisurely as the lawyer, preparing to leave, makes his way around town on a bitter cold Christmas Eve. What I found refreshing is that Phillips doesn't spell out every character in terms of who he or she is; he lets you discover it. People pop up, their relationship to the lawyer is unclear, names are tossed out and the reader isn't sure who they are, but at the end it all makes perfect sense. In other words, Phillips is an author who has respect for the intelligence of his audience. His writing is crisp and the atmosphere he creates is vivid. You feel like you know the characters and their milieu; everything seems real.
As in most noir fiction, no one is what you would call an upstanding citizen but Phillips makes you care about all of them. And the final denouement, which I have to admit I didn't see coming, left me smiling; it felt just right. It is so refreshing, after having recently read a James Patterson novel, to find an author who cares about such things as plot, characterization, and atmosphere. This is an excellent piece of work, highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Worth reading
Review: Ice Harvest was a refreshingly simplistic read. A lawyer on the lamb killing time before leaving his past behind bumbles into more tangled webs than a broom being waved in a 100 year old untouched attic. Reminiscent of Tim Dorsey or Hiaasen with a noir twist.
Rating:
Summary: One of the year's best
Review: In a year that saw some of the brightest new voices in noir fiction, Scott Phillips shines brightest. There were some excellent debuts in 2000, from Tod Goldberg to Peter Moore Smith to Marcia Simpson, but Phillips novel to me is a work that will stand the test of time not as a first novel, but as a work of literary integrity and grit. A wonderful novel about the frailities of man.
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Summary: Gothic noir that chills
Review: It is an icy, freezing Christmas Eve in Kansas with most people staying indoors to keep warm with their families. Charlie Arglist is all alone having been divorced by his now remarried wife and estranged from his children. Charlie ran a marginally successful law practice until he joined Bill Gerard and Vic Cavanaugh, the local mobsters. Vic and Charlie have financially stripped their clients and tomorrow plan to leave the country.Charlie is spending his last hours in town making the rounds of his favorite spots, strip bars, massage parlors, and the adult movie theaters that represent his failed past. He looks forward to his bright future, but to stay alive he soon finds himself killing the people he thought were his buddies. Readers who enjoy a gothic noir will like THE ICE HARVEST, a novel that looks at the underbelly of a small town on the Great Plains. The book takes place on Christmas Eve underlying the bleakness and hopelessness of the Charlies of the world who dominate the ever-darkening story line. Scott Phillips cleverly deals out information one card at a time so that the antihero's tale is not fully revealed until the ironic ending that will surprise the audience. Although this is Mr. Phillips' debut novel, it appears he has a long career ahead of him. Harriet Klausner
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Summary: Delightful noir period-piece encompassing the music of 1979!
Review: James Crumley, author of The Last Good Kiss, gives it a rousing endorsement and I can see why. The whole book takes place on Christmas Eve that year. The suspense is, what will happen to our protagonist on Christmas? Clues are provided along the way, adding to the mystery. Lots of quirky characters cross his path. This will make a good movie and, as music plays in the bars and on the car radio as the protagonist drives from place to place--to bar, to restaurant, to ex-wife, to bar, to bar, to bar, to bar, in a deepening snowfall, it will be easy to score from the radio of that year, 1979.
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Summary: Gritty Noir Fun
Review: The Ice Harvest is a very short book, barely clocking in at 200 pages. And yet, reading this was the most fun I've had in a while. This is a noir story that goes back to the earlier times of crime fiction, where the likes of Raymond Chandler ruled the genre. This gritty tale of crime is full of twists and turns and surprises. The book has everything you'd dream of finding in a crime novel; sex, drugs, alcohol, violence and, of course, lots and lots of money. Here, we have an attorney, Charlie, who's spending his last night in the city. Christmas eve, during one heck of a freezing rain/snowstorm (and you can imagine the many great gags that emerge out of this situation). Charlie works for people with lots of money, who own lots of bars and strip joints all across town. But Charlie has a secret. He's stolen a great deal of money from his bosses, and now he wants to leave his life behind and take the money with him. Of course, many people do not want to see him succeed and will try to stop him at all cost. The Ice Harvest has a very simple plot. And yet, you can't help yourself, you just want to keep on turning the pages. I loved the characters in this book, especially Charlie, who's your anti-hero par excellence. There is as much to hate as there is to love in him. His choices are often amoral and yet, you also feel sympathy for him in the strangests of times. The book is full of very colorful characters who all end up serving purpose to the plot. Phillips is a born storyteller; from the very first page, he takes you by the hand to bring you along a very wild and very fun ride. He knows when to end a storyline and starts a new one, when to end a joke before it gets old, or when to make a character disappear because he or she simply isn't needed anymore. This, you would only find in a master storyteller, so it is quite surprising to find these qualities in a first novel. If there is one complaint I have about the book, it would be its length. Maybe I would have liked to see more. Then again, I'm not sure that anymore subplot would have helped the narrative. In any case, as it is, The Ice Harvest is a nifty little book that does exactly what it sets out to do; to bring you a few hours of much deserved, much sought-after entertaiment. What more could you want from a crime novel?
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Summary: Jim Thompson and David Goodis would be proud
Review: THE ICE HARVEST is as good a first novel as one could hope for. Actually, it's far better than that. I read this tight little noir tale last December during a snowstorm here in Chicago. A few hours, a pint of Old Grandad, and I was thouroughly entertained by the tale of the doomed Charlie Arglist. Arglist is a jerk. A lousy dad, a doublecrossing snake of a lawyer(is that redundant?), and he's about to split town. Somehow I kept hoping he would make it. You could almost call this 'slapstick noir' but it's too well written. In a fair world, this would be held up as a shining example of what literature today ought to be. Novelists like Phillips, and Kent Harrington (Dia De Los Muertos), Zak Mucha(The Beggars' Shore), and Don De Grazia (American Skin), they should be supported and widely read, and given the exposure that the (mostly) hacks of oprah's book club unjustly receive. This is timeless writing and I predict that it will become a classic amongst lovers of truly great fiction.
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