Addictively engaging, profoundly serious fiction from an underappreciated master.
McFarlane contemplates the ripple effects of violent crime in 12 intricately layered stories based on an actual string of serial killings in 1990s Australia.
The diverse stories travel across decades and continents. The criminal investigation never becomes the central plot; the killer himself, here called Paul Biga, remains offstage while his victims appear only in fleeting mentions or glimpses. The protagonists’ connections to the crimes range from close to barely tangential. Timing matters, one story traveling back to 1950, when Biga’s future mother is 8 years old, another heading forward to a 2028 true-crime podcast. The opening story introduces the crimes’ physical reality, following a reluctant visitor to the forest where Biga’s victims had been found years earlier and where a sense of evil, and sexual, possibility still pervades. In 2003, an elderly woman’s lingering shame over her adolescent love for another girl resonates more powerfully than her more recent memories of Biga as her neighbor. Secret sexuality permeates characters’ lives, as does paranoia. Readers share a young woman’s growing fear in 1996 as she follows news reports that reveal a disquieting number of traits her boyfriend shares with an unidentified killer on the lam. Is it protective or paranoid maternal instinct pushing another woman to warn her younger sister against marrying a vaguely creepy boyfriend a decade earlier, in 1986? McFarlane uses the adventures of British schoolgirls in 1995 Rome to create misleading fear and tension before revealing a character who symbolizes resilience in the book. The travails of a politician unfortunately named Biga running for office four days after Paul Biga’s arrest offers discomforting comic relief. Given the large role media influence plays throughout, inevitably a television series about Biga shows up in 2024. So does Covid-19 in 2020, putting into perspective a single serial killer’s insignificance in a world reeling with global crises. However entertaining, McFarlane’s stories continually remind readers that behind true-crime stories’ escapist pleasure exist real death and human pain.
Addictively engaging, profoundly serious fiction from an underappreciated master.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780374606268
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sweet, sharp, and satisfying.
Their daughter’s wedding stirs up uncomfortable memories for a divorced couple.
The day before the ceremony, the bride’s mother, Gail Baines, second in command at the Ashton School in Baltimore, learns that not only has she been passed over to replace the retiring headmistress, but the new recruit is bringing her deputy with her. The lack of people skills that have cost Gail this promotion are evident even in that initial scene; she’s a classic cranky Tyler protagonist, given to blurting out her opinions with little consideration for others’ feelings. Her first-person narration also reveals her to be touchingly vulnerable, convinced that daughter Debbie, prettier and more polished than she, will inevitably prefer husband-to-be Kenneth’s overbearing, better-off parents. Although her divorce from Max was amicable, Gail considers him a bit of a slacker, and isn’t best pleased when he turns up with a rescue cat in tow and says he has to stay with her because Kenneth is horribly allergic. A startling revelation from Debbie, fresh from her pre-wedding “Day of Beauty,” immediately divides the exes, who have very different opinions about how their daughter should handle this crisis. It also leads to Gail’s revelation of the infidelity that led to their divorce, though not in the way readers might imagine. Laid-back Max is the only fully fleshed character here other than Gail, and the novel is very short, but Tyler’s touch is as delicate, her empathy for human beings and all their quirks as evident in her 25th work of fiction as it was in her first, published an astonishing 60 years ago. Gail’s acerbic observations about the wedding and all its participants, her wistful memories of her odd-couple romance with Max, and her account of their enforced intimacy over the three days surrounding the wedding alternate to poignant effect. The closing pages offer a happy ending that feels true to the characters and utterly deserved.
Sweet, sharp, and satisfying.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593803486
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
