A faltering from usually reliable melodramatist Goddard (A Debt of Dishonor; Into the Blue, etc.): Charlotte Ladram, mopping up after her elderly Aunt Beatrix's murder, unearths an incredible lode of 50- year-old scandals. Though it looks as if seamy antiquer Colin Fairfax-Vane turned burglar and killed Beatrix Abberley in a struggle over her Tunbridge Ware, Colin's brother Derek manages to persuade Charlie, after the obligatory resistance, that Colin's been framed by somebody who killed Beatrix to keep her from revealing a secret about her brother Tristram—an important poet who died fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Shortly before her death, it seems, Beatrix dispatched mysterious messages to her nephew Maurice's wife Ursula; to her old crony Lulu Harrington; to an unknown Madame V— in Paris and a Mrs. Van Something in New York; and to Tristram's old sergeant, Frank Griffith. Ursula insists that her parcel contained only blank paper, but the Griffith letters, supposedly burned unread, turn out to reveal that Beatrix actually wrote the poetry that made Tristram famous—a revelation that provides an obvious murder motive for a suspect much closer to home. Just when Charlie, with the help of Maurice and Tristram's duplicitous biographer Emerson McKitrick, thinks she's plumbed the depths of Beatrix's secret, a kidnapping and another murder make it clear that the parcels conceal still another secret- -which, despite Goddard's protestations, has nothing to do with the authorship of the poems. Under the banner of this second secret a new team—Charlie, Derek, and Frank—emerges to foil the kidnappers in Spain just in time for a ringingly irrelevant final scene back in England. The first half purrs along as expertly as any of Goddard's sturdy upper-class suspensers. He comes a cropper, though, with that second- tier secret and its working out, which lacks even the conviction of ingenuity.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-75070-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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