Goes beyond a cozy, small-town mystery to consider some immense and difficult matters.
A widow’s efforts to become a home-funeral guide entangle her in a murder case in this novel.
As Abby Tiernan’s husband, Tom, lies dying of cancer, he requests a home funeral rather than being embalmed in a mortuary and interred in an expensive casket. Washing and preparing a body at home, with burial in a simple wooden box, used to be the common practice, but nowadays few even know that it’s legal. In today’s culture, says a home-funeral guide Abby consults, “we want to disappear our dead.” After Tom’s death, Abby spirals downward, but starts pulling herself together—especially when community members in Falls Harbor, Maine, start asking for her help in conducting their own home funerals. She’s at first reluctant, but Abby sees a need and eventually starts offering her services as a home-funeral guide to people like Mark Jackson, whose wife, Susan, is dying. But not everyone appreciates her efforts, such as a local funeral home director. Attempts are made to scare her off; worse, Abby falls under suspicion after Susan dies—and readers already know from the prologue that it’s murder. Questions swirling, Abby decides to investigate, while also trying to salvage a relationship with her daughter, Delia, and to get closer to Brad Rainey, a Falls Harbor detective and widower. Buried secrets come to light, and Abby finds a way to move on while helping others. Mackey (Suddenly Spying, 2016, etc.) offers an unusual but successful combination of murder mystery, romance after widowhood, and a mother-daughter story with an informative and thoughtful discussion on attitudes and practices toward the dying and funerals. The traditional funeral-home director gets to say his piece here as well, giving the question a fair outing. The author also discusses the ethical issues involved with assisted suicide versus euthanasia, again presenting points of view equitably. These issues link well with the plot, and rarely become didactic. The mother-daughter dilemma is somewhat melodramatic and Abby’s endless what-if questions can become tiresome, but these are minor concerns.
Goes beyond a cozy, small-town mystery to consider some immense and difficult matters.Pub Date: Dec. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9972080-2-3
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Pink Granite Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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