Hector’s third case (Toros & Torsos, 2008, etc.) is another intriguing and convincing mix of history and hardboiled...
Was the shotgun blast that ended Ernest Hemingway’s life on July 2, 1961, really self-inflicted, or was it murder?
Hemingway’s oldest and closest friend, tough crime novelist Hector Lassiter, is full of misgivings as he travels to Papa’s Idaho ranch. Rumors abound that among the manuscripts Hemingway’s fourth wife Mary is guarding may be things that should not see the light of day. Mary has decided that she should be the subject of a biography, and to pen it she’s chosen Richard Paulson, an alcoholic professor with a beautiful and very pregnant wife. But Paulson aims to prove that Mary murdered Hemingway. He has help from a sleazy author, Donovan Creedy, a jealous wannabe who’s been on Hemingway’s case since his early days in Paris and now works for the FBI and the CIA. Racist, paranoid J. Edgar Hoover, who hounded every artist in the country, recruited Creedy years ago to spy on Hemingway. He’s still digging up dirt and is not above giving Paulson LSD to spike Mary’s drink. Lassiter carefully soothes hard-drinking Mary, reluctantly falls for Hannah Paulson despite her advanced pregnancy and finds himself in mortal jeopardy from both Creedy and an unidentified man who’s stalking Hannah. Papa’s failing health may indeed have led to suicide, but Lassiter must bring all his formidable talents to bear if he’s to flummox Hoover and protect Hemingway’s legacy.
Hector’s third case (Toros & Torsos, 2008, etc.) is another intriguing and convincing mix of history and hardboiled mystery.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-55437-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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