In Bartley’s (Unto the Daughters of Men, 2014, etc.) sixth historical noir, bank robber Ross Duncan tries to find a killer in Kansas City, Missouri, amid the fraying underworld peace.
In 1934, in an idyllic farmhouse outside of Kansas City, Duncan and friends discuss the finer points of guns, eat a home-cooked meal made by one man’s wife and then execute a gangster tied up under a tree. Skilled in guns and robbery, they may be hard men, but Duncan and company—including his partners Gordon and Gnennett, late of the Polish military—are in town to solve the murder of an old friend. Unfortunately, though Boss Tom Pendergast may still be nominally in charge of Kansas City, with the recent Kansas City Massacre and the assassination of Pendergast’s underworld lieutenant John Lazia, Kansas City has been thrown into disarray. So when Duncan agrees to help a mysterious Valencian singer named Rachel Hernando with her gangster problems and is suddenly getting shot at on the street, it’s unclear who is gunning for Duncan and why. Bartley confidently continues the Duncan series with classic noir touches—as with Bogart’s turn as Marlowe, Duncan seems to get a lot of information from helpful women—and a poetically crisp delivery: When Rachel demurs from Duncan’s compliment of “tough” by saying that she just hides it well, Duncan notes, “That’s what being tough means.” While Bartley writes an entertaining mystery-thriller, there’s also an interesting underlying theme about the loyalty of men: Pendergast’s world is falling apart because it lacks the loyalty that Duncan and his friends have for each other—the loyalty that drives Duncan to seek his own brand of justice. In order to make this historical world—especially the criminal landscape—clear to the reader, Duncan sometimes delivers informative asides on, for instance, the Kansas City Massacre or the Jacobean revival house they’re holed up in; while these asides are fluidly and usually clearly written, readers may wonder at the breadth of Duncan’s information.
Another strong book about Duncan’s attempts to do the right thing in an uncertain world.
Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1780362366
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Peach Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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