The eloquence of the language transcends—and almost redeems—the plot’s gimmickry in this remarkable debut.
A celebrated mathematician leaves a legacy of inexactitude to his confused progeny.
Isaac Severy, the elderly patriarch of a numerically gifted clan, predicts his own demise and awaits his executioner one morning in his Hollywood Hills backyard. After his death, his granddaughter Hazel receives a letter from him containing clues to the equation that is his life’s masterwork and also a prediction: “Three will die. I am the first.” Only Hazel and, as will be revealed later, her brother, Gregory, have been selected by Isaac to fulfill his mathematical designs, although they are not blood relations but foster children taken in by Isaac's black-sheep son, Tom, and adopted by Isaac after Tom’s imprisonment. Hazel is a failed Seattle bookseller, Gregory a not particularly diligent LAPD detective. These two nonmathematical Severys take turns with their uncle Philip, Isaac’s son, a particle physicist whose academic career has stalled, having chapters told from their perspectives. Romantic yearnings, of the illicit and/or near-incestuous variety, afflict all three. Several vividly sketched minor players vie for access to Isaac’s secret, not least his reclusive daughter, Paige, a probability theorist, and her son, Alex, an aspiring international man of mystery. Strangers are also circling. P. Booth Lyons, allegedly a government agent, has sent his persistent secretary, Nellie Stone, to stalk Philip around the campus of Caltech. A strange professor wants Hazel to meet him at the La Brea Tar Pits. The path to Isaac’s equation meanders through a hotel room numbered 137, a stubbornly password-protected computer, and a map of Los Angeles dotted with stickers noting dates and times. The second to die validates Isaac’s dire prophecy, lending urgency to the quest to decipher the stickers. In lovely, inventive prose, Jacobs re-engineers the tropes of family drama to explore age-old conundrums of destiny versus self-determination. However, the sheer number of characters and gambits threatens to overwhelm such a relatively short novel, as does the magnitude of its ambition.
The eloquence of the language transcends—and almost redeems—the plot’s gimmickry in this remarkable debut.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7512-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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