A tense, claustrophobic detective tale about the toll exacted on people trying to uncover the truth.
Fighting for the innocent might put you on the right side, but it doesn’t mean you’ll be safe.
When the mutilated body of a 7-year-old boy is found in the river of a big city, pollen and other debris on the corpse suggest he comes from a valley far away in a neighboring country. In Osborn’s unsettling debut, a biological anthropologist and her husband—who acts as her forensic team’s assistant, translator, and our narrator—get sent south by their agency to collect plant and mineral samples to confirm the boy’s identity. Their efforts overlap with the gruesome discovery of a mass grave, and the couple’s attempt to go home with the samples gets blocked by the country’s new regime. Why do they care about the child? Who is in the mass grave? Are these deaths somehow related? Osborn keeps a tight leash on the action as the couple seeks answers. They encounter a host of menacing characters in an unnamed country with a violent history that local officials dismiss. (“That is all in the past. It is over. That does not happen in the present time.…We are progressive!”) Conversations and the narrator’s commentary are restrained and opaque, often to a frustrating degree. “What’s happening to us?” the anthropologist demands of someone helping them. “Oh, you’ll need to find that out for yourselves” is all he’ll say. It’s clear Osborn wants readers to feel the same way while the couple searches for the murderer and possible motives. That search involves jungle treks, interrogation rooms, government double talk, and absurd bureaucratic dead ends worthy of Beckett or Kafka. All of this makes the pair burn for justice and feel “increasingly angry, against [their] instincts for self-preservation.” They resist the sensational conclusions of the authorities, locals, and even their superiors that the child was a victim of some strange ritual. Though the body’s dismemberment and objects found among the boy’s things seem to support that theory, the couple insists there’s a more sinister explanation. That insistence might put at risk their jobs, their relationship, and even their lives, but what haunts them more is the thought of giving up: “What are we if we let this go?” That’s a question neither wants to answer in this harrowing, tautly plotted story.
A tense, claustrophobic detective tale about the toll exacted on people trying to uncover the truth.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781954276406
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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