Run-of-the-mill psychological thriller tarted up with psychobabble.
Is the governor of Louisiana planning to kill his daughter because he knows that she knows he killed her mother to further his political and romantic interests—or is the daughter simply paranoid?
Thirty-five-year-old Grayson Guillory finds an unmarked video in a hollowed-out copy of a Huey Long biography. Even before she watches it, she suspects the worst, and she’s right: the tape shows Grayson’s mother, shortly before her supposed suicide 11 months before, claiming that her husband, whose political ambitions range beyond the governor’s mansion, was plotting with others to kill her. Still deeply depressed about her mother’s death, Grayson begins to suspect every word and deed of her beloved father—who waited only two months to marry his dead wife’s sister. She also suspects his cronies, including her own fiancé Carter, her father’s closest political aide. Using italics to suggest the divisions growing inside Grayson as she second-guesses her own and everyone else’s motivations, Dewberry (a.k.a. Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn: Break the Heart of Me, 1994, etc.) effectively depicts her narrator’s increasing paranoia as it races alongside her increasingly reasonable dread. But Grayson is so spoiled and self-centered that readers will find it difficult to care much about her predicament, particularly since the narrow world she and the governor’s entourage inhabit is peopled by others even less likable or believable. Grayson’s mother is the worst sort of Tennessee Williams reject while her father is a Huey Long wannabe. Carter, meanwhile, is a noncharacter whose only interesting trait, collecting fish for his salt-water aquarium, turns out to be a plot device. Since his relationship with Grayson lacks nuance or romance, the fact that he may be manipulating or betraying her isn’t particularly disturbing. In truth, as the body count rises, the mystery of who did what becomes almost comically obvious—despite Dewberry’s ever-so-serious pretensions.
Run-of-the-mill psychological thriller tarted up with psychobabble.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14854-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: BlueHen/Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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