Kidnapping, stakeouts and shootouts disrupt the otherwise cozy tone without solving the puzzle or explaining the criminals’...
A body washed up on a beach plunges the English seaside town of Frantham into the midst of a byzantine kidnap conspiracy in this obscurely plotted follow-up to A Reason to Kill (2008).
DI Sebastian “Mac” McGregor is on the road to recovery from the trauma that sidelined him for months: watching a cornered kidnapper slash to death a little girl before he could save her. Even violent Edward Parker’s fatal fall from a cliff hasn’t dented his newfound optimism. Mac keeps tabs on Parker’s son George, who’s been consigned by social services to the Hill House children’s home; he dines at Peverill Lodge with actress-turned-boarding-house-proprietor Rina Martin and her menagerie of retired showbiz folk; he even summons the gumption to flirt with comely medical examiner Miriam Hastings. But when a body washed up in a cove turns out to be not the expected corpse of Parker, but that of 24-year-old Pat Duggan, the pace of Mac’s life accelerates, and not in a good way. Duggan’s father Jimmy reveals that Pat was kidnapped not once but twice, part of a vast string of abductions staged by Travis Haines. This shadowy mastermind also snatched the Goldman twins and the Randall boy, who was returned minus a finger. And George Parker recognizes Haines’ goons, Stan and Coran, as the men he’d seen with his dad shortly before the cliffside plunge. Will Mac intervene in time to save other children from peril?
Kidnapping, stakeouts and shootouts disrupt the otherwise cozy tone without solving the puzzle or explaining the criminals’ motives.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7278-6680-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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