A rousing religious mystery—pastrami not included.
In Appel’s (The Biology of Luck, 2013, etc.) mystery novel, an unusual rabbi seeks the truth about a local woman’s death.
Kappelmacher isn’t your typical rabbi. He has a faithful congregation but also a mind for riddles, a nose for the mysterious and a distinct love for pastrami sandwiches. When his former assistant rabbi, lawyer Marshall Green, tells him about the suspicious death of Florence Eisenstein, an elderly client with a complicated will, Kappelmacher and his current assistant, Steinmetz, snap to action to get to the bottom of it. It turns out that Florence and her sister, Lorraine, were bound by a caveat in their wealthy father’s will that neither would ever marry; if either did so, the newlywed would be disinherited and the other sister would receive her share. But strangely, Florence died the day after her wedding. A doctor says that she passed away due to an asthma attack, but some people aren’t so sure. Was someone trying to kill Florence’s sister, in a case of mistaken identity, to come into some quick cash? Or did Florence’s cousin, Agatha, or nephew, Fred, kill her to settle an old family grudge? Using lies and clever tricks, Kappelmacher and Steinmetz try to quietly solve Florence’s murder before someone finds out they’re not professional detectives. Appel’s novel is funny, thoughtful and fiercely entertaining, but it does run into a few bumps along the way. For example, Kappelmacher’s use of Yiddish at every turn is somewhat overwrought; he insults Steinmetz with so many “dumkopfs” and “nudniks” that readers may start to feel a little bad for the guy. That said, Kappelmacher largely comes off as a stimulating, perfectly idiosyncratic frontman throughout this tale. The well-paced plot neither plods nor races to the finish as some other whodunits do, and the final resolution is both surprising and refreshing. Appel, a prolific writer in other genres, would do well to continue writing such suspenseful prose, as he apparently has a knack for it.
A rousing religious mystery—pastrami not included.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-1939816146
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Cozy Cat Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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