An enthralling but messy mystery about risks and community.
A Massachusetts shore town museum director gets caught in a Byzantine murder plot in this LGBTQ+ novel.
Perched at the very end of Cape Cod, Provincetown is a haven for transplants and runaways of all stripes. It is also the location of HomePort Estate, the mansion-turned–artist colony set atop a giant sand dune. It is on the estate that the well-intentioned but friendless widow C.J. Strongue, a relative newcomer to the area, is found electrocuted in the studio of renowned local artist Mavis Chandry. A death on the property is the last thing that Helena Handbasket—the current inhabitant of the HomePort mansion, executive director of the estate, and “full-time female impersonator”—needs on her plate, especially when the scene of the crime is so unsettling: “The gaunt figures on the canvases scattered about the room looked like ghostly witnesses, while Mavis’s empty easel resembled a blood-spattered instrument of torture. Amid all this, C.J.’s straw sunhat looked glaringly out of place.” Helena is just about to open a new museum on the estate featuring an exhibition containing dozens of Mavis’ works. When the show is vandalized shortly before the grand opening, it becomes clear that someone is targeting Mavis and that poor C.J. happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. What’s more, Mavis is quick to accuse Helena of being the one who wants her dead—a charge that the local police are happy to indulge. Helena finds herself at the center of a murder case as strange as any the Outer Cape has ever seen: one involving stolen art, secret lovers, and some grade-A impersonating. But can Helena save everything she and her friends have built, or will it all be swept away like fishing boats in a sudden storm?
In this sequel, Burch summons Provincetown’s eclectic, art-and-barnacles ethos with an eye for detail and plenty of campy humor. (At one point, Helena explains to Det. Amy Morgan that she was wearing her “life breasts” when she fell off a boat. “ ‘Life breasts?’ Amy asked, her head tilted to one side. ‘A special set of fake boobs that double as a flotation device.’ ”) The almost-400-page book is far too long given that there’s really only enough plot for 200. It often seems as though the author couldn’t decide whether to write a genre mystery or something more literary, and the resulting story moves a bit too slowly to hold many readers’ interest. But the characters are numerous and uniformly engaging, and Burch deftly explores many of the paradoxes of Provincetown: the tensions between townies and “washashores”; the wealthy and the broke; straights and gays; and female impersonators and everybody else. Readers who make it all the way through will do so because the author has created a world worthy of hanging around in. At a certain point, the plot becomes secondary to the peculiar spell Burch weaves with Helena and her milieu.
An enthralling but messy mystery about risks and community.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781734053395
Page Count: 409
Publisher: HomePort Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.
When two women who share a birthday meet, a journalist becomes the subject of her own true-crime mystery.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. Alix is a successful journalist, and Josie convinces Alix that her story is worth telling: Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40. “I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed?” she confesses to Alix. “But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.” From this premise Alix creates a Netflix series, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! which investigates Josie’s life as she reconciles what happened to her as a teen and seeks a new path. With the story unfinished, the narrative unfolds in the present tense, with prose that jingles like song lyrics: “He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double vision through the glass windows of the hotel.” Alix is both intrigued and repulsed by Josie, but she initially gives her the benefit of the doubt. After all, Alix’s husband, Nathan, has a drinking problem, and Alix knows what it’s like to be reluctant to leave a bad situation. But Josie seems more interested in being part of Alix’s seemingly glamorous life than she is in fixing her own, and when three people end up dead and Alix’s life is turned upside down, the evidence points to Josie—and turns the TV series into a murder mystery. Transcripts from Alix’s interviews alternate with the narrative, offering increasingly varied perspectives on Josie’s story as told by her neighbors, friends, and family members. With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth.
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179007
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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