Aiken at her most serious, with neither fluff nor suspense—in a gloomy, drifty, faintly gothic modern-novel (adultery, death, soul-searching) that occasionally sends up flares of charm and poignancy. The largely unsatisfactory narrator/heroine: Clytie Churchill, 35, a talented British achiever (novelist, cookbook-writer, catering tycoon) who recalls her busy, death-haunted love life during an all-night rap session with a French doctor at a chateau. (Don't ask how Clytie wound up there: it's a foolishly contrived—and ineffectual—setup.) Clytie's first great love was journalist Dan, whom she married soon after the suicide of his first wife, death-obsessed poet Ingrid; but, hours after the wedding, Dan committed suicide too, perhaps taking his baby son along on the doomed boat-ride. (Clytie thinks the son may still be alive somewhere.) Then came simultaneous affairs with the husbands of Clytie's two best friends: tweedy architect Hugh, husband of maternal Elly; and sallow publisher George, husband of career-driven Chris. But, though both liaisons were initially dandy (with Elly and Chris cheerfully, unconvincingly, in the know), both men soon died—Hugh of lung cancer, George of an unspecified illness that made him mad, violent, then helpless. (In one of the book's best moments, his wife and mistress alternate reading Pride and Prejudice to the dying man.) And Clytie's most recent major affair has also been shadowed with death: five years back she loved local (Sussex) lawyer Anthony, whose pregnant wife had been killed in a motorcycle accident outside Clytie's house; but Anthony, a Catholic, angrily departed when he found out about Clytie's adulterous past. So now, unsurprisingly, Clytie is rather sour on love—and preoccupied with mortality. ("Goodbye, Anthony. Goodbye, my last love.") She is dubious about responding to the French doc's serious-minded courtship. And, after returning home to find her house burned to the ground (by Dan's crazy mother), she plans to open a pub in partnership with beautiful ex-prostitute Teddy. . . while Anthony becomes a monk. ("There's still a lot to do. . . . Promises to keep. Meals to cook. Friends to cherish.") Unfortunately, Clytie is a half-formed, unappealing Modern Woman—a shaky mix of feminism, enlightened promiscuity, sentimentality, and existential angst. The plotting, too, with its parade of violent demises and its halfhearted glimmers of mystery, is a rickety frame for serious thoughts on love and death. Still, for every creaky or pretentious moment, there's also a touching or disarming one (the supporting cast, the food-talk, the Sussex vignettes); and though Aiken fans won't find the usual pleasures here, they may be intermittently engaged by this uneven, ambitious blend of the morbid and the whimsical.
Pub Date: March 1, 1983
ISBN: 0385183712
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1983
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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