An engagingly written mystery featuring art, glamour, sex, love, and murder.
In Halt’s debut mystery, an art gallery co-owner is sent a painting depicting her slain in a bathtub—and then the scene plays out for real.
In 1980s Cologne, Germany, American Amanda Lee and German Marlene Eichler own the Lee Eichler Gallery. Glamorous Marlene laments her divorce from prominent architect Wolf Eichler, with whom she remains friends. However, she also enjoys high-end shopping, posh salon visits, and sex with wealthy, married art collectors and pickups at questionable clubs. A major show is about to open at the gallery, featuring the death-inspired works of leading artist Klaus Kruger. Art critic Dieter Becker works with Marlene to promote it, and he feels entitled to kickbacks from gallery sales for his efforts. Amanda refuses, infuriating the critic, who hides a dark past. Then Amanda finds Marlene slashed to death in a bathtub, and it turns out that Marlene had received a mysterious package at the gallery—one that contained a painting of her own future murder. Kommissar Fredrich Grutzmacher and his underling Ernst Rudolf investigate both Amanda and Wolf as potential suspects. Readers will find this chilling story hard to put down, as the crimes (yes, plural) are gruesome and the suspects, numerous. The author, who once lived in Germany, captures the edgy atmosphere of that country’s art and club scenes in the ’80s, and she offers richly developed characters along the way; at one point, for instance, the entitled Marlene insists that a married lover appear with her in public at an expensive restaurant—where she then orders a pricey bottle of champagne. Indeed, luxury is everywhere in vivid descriptions of cashmere and silk attire, high-performance sports cars, and fine wine and food. The pacing is also well calibrated as the action moves from scares in the dark to sensual trysts.
An engagingly written mystery featuring art, glamour, sex, love, and murder.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62694-887-7
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Black Opal Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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