A fiercely intelligent crime drama as emotionally sharp as it is historically inventive.
In Krishtalka’s (Death Spoke, 2019, etc.) third mystery-series installment, a private detective and former paleontologist investigates a bizarre incident with a complex historical pedigree.
At Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum, a well-known historical diorama—Arab Courier Attacked by Lions, “one of America’s cultural treasures”—has been torn apart by someone who also attacked the exhibit’s guard. The assailant then sliced open the belly of the taxidermic camel and took something that, upon inspection, appears to have been the mummified remains of a small, female child. Without any clear suspect or motive for the crime, the police call in Harry Przewalski, a private investigator who once worked at the museum as a paleontologist; after a series of personal misfortunes, he’d joined the military and “fled to the violent solitude of a desert war.” Liza Kole, another paleontologist and who has also been Harry’s romantic partner in the past, informs him that the art installation was created, to great fanfare, 150 years ago by Jules Verreaux; he was known as the “finest taxidermist in France”—one with the skills to “give immortality” to the dead. Anna Storck, the museum’s physical anthropologist, commits suicide only two days after the vandalism, and police believe that the two events are unconnected. But Harry, in his inimitable style, is skeptical: “Yeah, well, in our business coincidence could be a fact just waiting for an equation.” He soon finds that Verreaux had seduced and impregnated a Elisabeth Greef, Dutch woman, in Capetown, South Africa, and when he abandoned her, she “sued him for betrayal.” The child inside the camel could have been hers—and the vandalism, an act of revenge. Over the course of this novel, Krishtalka artfully conjures the grim life of the prodigiously talented Verreaux. The taxidermist is such a sordid character that there were indeed multiple reasons why someone one would want to take revenge upon him—even a century and a half after he’d created his diorama. Throughout, the author presents the evidence with great skill: Verreaux’s journals, the letters between him and Elisabeth, and detailed accounts of the trial in which she sued him for breach of contract are all revealed to connect to the modern-day mystery. Krishtalka’s prose is powerfully versatile, alternating between the sort of terse, unsentimental phrasing that one would expect from a detective story and poetical elegance. At one point, for example, when Harry sees a pencil sketch of Elisabeth, he finds himself swept away: “For a moment, Harry was lost in the damp heat of her bed, that angular face fierce in love or revenge, the full lips primed to kiss or slay, the wild hair on the pillow exploding in fervor or fury, the bare back arched in rapture or revolt, the long legs in ecstasy or constriction.” Harry’s own life also poignantly reveals duality, but his is a tug of war between painful memories and a longing to rejoin the land of the living.
A fiercely intelligent crime drama as emotionally sharp as it is historically inventive.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-941237-32-8
Page Count: 279
Publisher: Anamcara Press LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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