Probably worthy of an encore—if the author gets a dialogue coach.
Retired Los Angeles private eye Amos Parisman probes the death of a controversial rabbi.
Parisman debuts on the mystery scene, bravely flaunting his Yiddishkeit in his first-person narrative. Unfortunately, he loses his street cred by the end of Chapter 1, mangling both Hebrew and Yiddish translations and transliterations with equal abandon. Alav hashalom (not le sholem, Parisman’s weirdly French-sounding rendition) really does more or less mean “rest in peace,” but twisting alter kocker into alte katchke (which would rhyme with tchotchke) does not make it closer to meaning “old duck.” Parisman’s gumshoe chops come across as a little more authentic. He’s reasonably skeptical when Howie Rothbart hires him to investigate the death of Rabbi Ezra Diamant of Shir Emmet, a wealthy West Hollywood congregation. Why would the board suspect that the demise of their overweight, middle-aged spiritual leader, who keeled over into his matzo ball soup lunch at Canter’s Deli on Fairfax, was anything but the natural consequences of his poor food and exercise choices? Rothbart’s repeated claim that Diamant rubbed people the wrong way does little to convince Parisman he’s looking at a murder. But the subsequent death by crowbar of Diamant’s doctor, Dora Ewing, does. By now Amos has grown cautious enough to hire ex-wrestler Omar Villasenor to provide some much-needed muscle, and the ill-assorted pair provide an entertaining tour of LA while they track down a killer with a surprising motive.
Probably worthy of an encore—if the author gets a dialogue coach.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-945551-64-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Prospect Park Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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