A light and amusing whodunit that proves time spent in the company of the heroine is time well spent indeed.
Stella Reynolds investigates a pair of murders in this latest installment of Kirsch’s (The Big Interview, 2016, etc.) chick-lit mystery series.
Book 3 finds the intrepid reporter and amateur detective on the trail of a major drug ring in Knoxville, Tennessee. Stella has moved up the journalism food chain, enjoying a good job in a larger market. She doesn’t have to carry her own TV equipment, and she is far more comfortable with those tricky live shots. Outside of work, Stella is living with her old friend Janet Black, across town from ex-boyfriend John, and still considering her options with former flame and NASCAR driver Lucky Haskins. When Stella covers an overnight shift that morphs from a house fire to a murder, she soon finds herself on a complicated and dangerous case. Two homicides in one night appear to be connected, and the suspect who’s in jail may not be the guilty party. An anonymous tipster pushes Stella to look deeper at the killings, and it becomes apparent that Knoxville’s low crime rates are an illusion. Widespread drug and gang problems lie just below the surface, and government officials, detectives, and leading business owners are all on the take. Kirsch’s third Stella Reynolds mystery still feels fresh and fun. Though the narrative follows a predictable format—what seems to be a straightforward crime is a coverup with larger ramifications—it is still enjoyable to watch the mystery unravel. Kirsch’s leading lady remains a funny and relatable heroine. Her plucky attitude and aptitude for stumbling into sticky situations are pleasantly reminiscent of Janet Evanovich’s popular Stephanie Plum character. Roommate Janet provides an amusing, if somewhat clichéd, tough-nut foil to Stella’s optimism and do-gooder spirit. Stella’s love life is relevant but on the periphery, allowing the focus to remain on the case. One of the strongest facets of Kirsch’s series is her insider knowledge of journalism and TV reporting, which lends a feeling of authenticity to the plot and puts a unique spin on the cozy mystery genre.
A light and amusing whodunit that proves time spent in the company of the heroine is time well spent indeed.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9969350-3-6
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Sunnyside Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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