Intertwines absurdly understated violence with a reflective portrait of the city and its types so anthropologically precise...
In Betto’s debut thriller, a killer is loose in a Rio de Janeiro residential hotel.
“Rooms for single ladies and gentlemen. Family environment,” announces the sign Dona Dinó has hung outside the Hotel Brasil. And indeed her guests—political aide Rui Pacheco, aspiring telenovela actress Rosaura dos Santos, journalist Marcelo Braga, retired puta Madame Larência, cross-dressing nightclub singer Diamante Negro—feel like family in their combination of community, reserve and selective dislike. But the family comes under attack when retired salesman Seu Marçal, who still peddles the odd gemstone, is stabbed to death and relieved of first his eyes and then his head. Delegado Olinto Del Bosco, head of the Delagacia da Lapa, can think of no better approach to police work than to arrest hotel caretaker Jorge Maldonado and beat a confession out of him. And retired professor Cândido Oliviera, a hotel resident who’s the logical candidate to serve as a more effective detective, is distracted by his long-running concern for the neighborhood’s street kids, especially the glue-sniffing 11-year-old Beatriz, and his new professional collaboration with acclaimed anthropologist Mônica Kundali, which would surely blossom into love if only he could beat back his schoolboy shyness. As it is, no one takes the investigation firmly in hand, leaving the “Lapa Decapa” free to move on to other hotel residents, though not before first-timer Betto has provided incisive back stories for each of them.
Intertwines absurdly understated violence with a reflective portrait of the city and its types so anthropologically precise that you’ll mourn each new victim—and that’s a lot of mourning.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-908524-27-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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