Wish Bone Alley

Tom Venetis is a professional journalist and editor in Toronto.

There are so many things wrong with this novel that it is hard to know
where to begin. One can start with the rather overwrought plot of Matt
Peebles and his adventures among a strange cavalcade of characters, from
migrant workers to a rather persistent cop who has it in for him, all
transpiring across the streets of New York and down into the Amazon.
Then there are the poorly constructed and developed characters.

Kiernan’s prose is a combination of declarative earnestness and bad
pulp writing that seems to have walked out of the yellowing pages of the
1950s True Crime Stories: “Ilk—I’ll never forgive Mort Bigelow for
hanging his wretched coat permanently on that word. It was bad enough
witnessing his sock drying on the caboose of the English
language—behoove, but to marginalize ilk was to me, as rotten an act
as Saddam Hussein greeting his lowly minions with the gesture of a
shotgun blast from the perch of his royal balcony—or for that matter,
the production of any 1970’s TV spinoff and furthering the allusion
…” Wish Bone Alley is filled with such badly written passages that
are sure to tax even the most patient reader.

Kiernan admits on the cover that his novel is a threadbare tale with no
serviceable parts inside. There is some truth in advertising, after all.