Having tackled magazine editors, ghost-writers, and first-time novelists, Feldman (Looking for Love, 1990, etc.), who also writes as Elizabeth Villars, now turns to freelancers and young-adult gurus in her latest spin on Manhattan literati. Terminally unmarried Hallie Fields forgets the advice an editor once gave her never to ``sleep with a subject'' when the subject of her latest profile, one handsome and dashing Dexter St. John, expresses an interest that goes beyond the purely professional. Dexter is the founder and president of the Twenty- first Century Health Fund and on the road more often than not, leaving Hallie plenty of time to ignore his flaws and engross herself in her new subject: the woman who reinvented the YA novel. Emma Weill, a formerly neglected child of divorce from Hallie's own hometown and now a world-renowned writer, appears to have it all: a rewarding and successful career, two happy children, and a handsome, intelligent husband in Julian, a former professor and would-be writer living off Emma's royalty checks and advances. But behind the scenes, of course, Julian is an adulterous lech who not only hits on Hallie as she works on her profile but has affairs with countless students and other young victims, all in a pathetic yet effective attempt to exert power over Emma in the only way he feels he can. With her customary in-depth interviewing, it doesn't take Hallie long to realize that this subject's life is more complicated than it seemed at first. And when disaster inevitably strikes, it's she who has to help pick up the pieces, in the process gaining insight into her own past and into the hearts and minds of women as close to home as her mother and herself. Feldman's feminist intentions become murky at times, and the intended suspense is nonexistent, but Hallie and Emma manage to save some face in this lukewarm portrayal of modern womanhood.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-30913-9
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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