Less compelling as a story than as a richly teeming historical canvas.
The seamy side of silent pictures.
After killing her abusive husband in self-defense, Flavia Purcell leaves Wichita to stay with her grandfather, photographer Bill Ogden, in Los Angeles. In 1916, the Hollywood studios have yet to establish themselves, and filmmaking is a dog-eat-dog world. Clyde Grady, who’s graduated from one-reel comedies to stag films, joins forces with Irene Buntnagel, of the West Coast Art Company, and her husband, George Kaplan, of the film company Provident, whose sex film starring streetwalkers Trudy Crombie and Victoria Tessart encourages him to propose a series of “queer stuff.” The X-rated films produced by Magnificat Educational Distribution Company, Incorporated, are so successful despite flouting the laws of the Postal Service that they provide the thread that (barely) holds together several far-reaching subplots. Small-time criminal Ezra Crombie, Trudy’s long-estranged husband, turns up determined to make a go of it with her. Henry Seghers, who meets Ezra aboard a freight train the two of them have hopped, becomes Bill’s assistant and falls in love with Flavia. Tommy Gill, a vaudeville star whose career in film comedies is on a steep decline, finds himself co-starring with Trudy’s two children by Ezra, who punch and humiliate him onscreen to universal laughter. Postal inspector Melvin van de Kamp switches from patronizing the workers in a local brothel to watching the latest blue movies the madam sets up for him. The city grows sharply divided over the question of whether the U.S. should enter the Great War. The roster of hangers-on is obviously headed for a day of reckoning, but when it finally arrives in a series of violent confrontations, it can’t help seeming anticlimactic.
Less compelling as a story than as a richly teeming historical canvas.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781641294935
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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