Warts and all, this is escapist historical fiction that expertly renders its setting.
The killing of Harlan Winthrop is almost just a sidebar in this portrait of San Francisco in the tense early days of World War II.
Harlan Winthrop does indeed wind up dead very early on, his lifeless body found in the famous Coit Tower in front of a controversial mural featuring the graffiti “RoBerTo,” supposedly standing for Rome/Berlin/Tokyo. This clearly implicates Axis sympathizers, which launches a very secret investigation led by Tony Bosco, lawyer, former police commissioner, and go-to guy in all such matters. Tony teams up with Dennis Sullivan, a new and hunky hire, and, eventually, sassy Ruthie Adams. Winthrop, though a reactionary—he believed strongly that White Anglo-Saxons were the master race—was still respected; in fact, he was heading up the war bond drive in the city. What the reader learns early on is that he had a very kinky hidden private life. The war informs everything here in 1942. The internment of the Japanese is underway, and German and Italian citizens are suspected in many quarters. Communism (like socialism) is anathema to patriotic citizens, but now we have the embodiment of godless communism, Russia, on the side of the allies! There is also an episode with Tony driving down to Pescadero where his brother, Lorenzo, a priest, has Mexican immigrants in his parish who may be fifth columnists.
What really carries this book is the period atmosphere. The first thing that strikes the reader is how completely suffused the story is with Catholicism. Tony is an ardent Catholic (as are his Irish friends on the San Francisco Police Department), and so is his brother Enzo, of course. The Knights of Columbus is but one of many Catholic organizations that Tony belongs to. Issel is a San Francisco native and history professor emeritus at San Francisco State and has written a couple of scholarly books on Catholicism and politics in mid-20th-century San Francisco. To a bewildered reader, this nonetheless makes a lot of the book seem like gratuitous proselytizing and a bit wearying. But we like Tony anyway, almost as much as he loves his wife and his new Buick Century, “the banker’s hot rod.” Period fashions are lovingly described, as are Italian cuisine and various neighborhoods. On the downside, racism is rampant and casual, true to the times. Tony’s wife, backed by Catholic social thought, does persuade him that “Jap” is a crude and unacceptable term. And to his credit, Tony is not comfortable with the Japanese internment, and he uses his pull to see that a White and Japanese family is not broken apart—not by keeping them out of the camps but by making sure that the White wife joins her husband and daughter in them! Issel is a historian trying his hand at fiction, and it shows. Character exposition is often labored and dialogue stiff, reminiscent of Dragnet. But with the color and ambiance of Chinatown, it’s a wash.
Warts and all, this is escapist historical fiction that expertly renders its setting.Pub Date: July 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-926664-20-3
Page Count: 212
Publisher: BACAT
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.
An aspiring mystery writer sets out to solve her great-aunt’s murder and inherit an estate.
Twenty-five-year-old Annie Adams has never met her great-aunt Frances, who prefers her small village to busy London. But when a mysterious letter arrives instructing Annie to come to Castle Knoll in Dorset to meet Frances and discuss her role as sole beneficiary of her great-aunt’s estate, Annie can’t resist. Unfortunately, she arrives to find Frances’ worst fears have come true: The elderly woman—who’s been haunted for decades by a fortuneteller’s prediction that this will happen—has been murdered, and her will dictates that she will leave her entire estate to Annie, but only if Annie solves her killing. It’s a cheeky if not exactly believable premise, especially since the local police don’t seem terribly opposed to it. Annie herself is an engaging presence, if a little too blind to the fact that she could be on the killer’s to-do list. Her roll call of suspects is pleasingly long, including but not limited to the local vicar, a one-time paramour of her great-aunt’s; a gardener who grows a lot more than flowers; shady developers and suspicious friends from Frances’ past; and Saxon, Annie’s crafty rival, who inherits the estate himself if he manages to solve the case first. Annie pieces together clues through readings of Frances’ journal, but the story eventually runs aground on the twin rocks of too much explanation and a flimsy climax. Cute dialogue gives way to lengthy exposition, and by the time Frances’ killer is revealed you may well be ready to leave Annie, Dorset, and Castle Knoll behind for the firmer ground of reality. Fans of cozy mysteries are likely to be more forgiving, but if you cast a skeptical eye toward amateur sleuths, this novel won’t change your mind about them.
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593474013
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
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