Howorth’s dedication to capturing the messy, fraught and politically incorrect pieces of Mississippi life ultimately makes...
An unvarnished picture of Southern life by debut author Howorth, co-owner of the storied Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.
After many years, Mary Byrd Thornton receives news that her then-9-year-old stepbrother’s unsolved murder is being reopened. In response, she breaks a plate—a Corelle plate, not her Spode china, because she has a “maddening way of second-thinking her impulses.” As the loose plot follows Mary Byrd from the deep South to her hometown in Virginia to meet the cold-case detective, her impulses and second guesses set the tone. Most of the story takes the form of Mary Byrd's internal monologue, which can indeed be maddening. She’s dedicated to her life as wife and mother in a small college town in Mississippi but unconvinced of her value or efficacy in those roles. She's antsy, too, alert for opportunities to escape into her small stash of prescription pills or dabble in infidelity as she has before. The result is a character who vibrates between self-castigation and stubborn defiance, like a teenager. She makes phone calls in a closet to avoid scrutiny by her family’s longtime African-American housekeeper, Evagreen, sensing that she doesn’t have the right breeding or attitude to earn Evagreen’s respect. This and other moments where Mary Byrd recognizes her white privilege are awkward. She embodies a soup of self-awareness, liberal guilt and helplessness surely familiar—and uncomfortably accurate—to many white people. It’s intriguing that Howorth’s omniscient narration veers into Evagreen’s thoughts at times and later spends a night in the mind of a homeless black man named Teever, a fixture in town. Both are dealing with their own tragedies but exhibit a grounded, confident quality that Mary Byrd lacks. How conscious a judgment this is on the author’s part is hard to say.
Howorth’s dedication to capturing the messy, fraught and politically incorrect pieces of Mississippi life ultimately makes for a compelling read.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62040-301-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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