A well-told, if idiosyncratic, family drama with an unsolved killing at its center.
A murder mystery unfolds over multiple generations of a Maine family in this novel.
Winterhaven, Maine, 1958. The Therberges are wracked with grief after their missing daughter, 8-year-old Mary Sue, is found dead beneath a granite boulder. Police attention turns to her brother, John Daniel, 10, the last known person to see her alive. When the case goes cold, private investigator Rocky O’Hara, recently of Atlanta and now of Portland, Maine, is asked by Margaret Powell, a relative of the Therberges, to offer a new perspective on the murder. Rocky is fresh from a similar homicide case in Georgia—one disturbing enough that it caused him to leave his home state for a new life in New England—and he’s committed to bringing Mary Sue’s killer to justice. Meanwhile, John Daniel—whose activities include burying cats alive in his grandmother’s garden and lighting fires in his bedroom closet—appears to know more about the crime than he’s letting on, and his mother seems bent on directing any suspicion away from her son. She isn’t the only family member who suddenly seems uninterested in finding the culprit. Margaret lets Rocky know that his services are no longer needed: “Casting his mind back to that first encounter in his office, he never would have imagined that lady ever giving up…ever. So, what happened? What changed? Did some horrible family secret become known to Margaret which she felt bound to keep secret?” But Rocky’s history with the case is just beginning: The murder of Mary Sue will haunt John Daniel—or JD, as he’s known in adulthood—and the rest of the Therberge family all the way into the 21st century. Baumgardner’s (Languid Lilies, 2019, etc.) prose is detailed and sharp, particularly in her economical descriptions of her characters, including John Daniel’s grandfather: “Grampy has control of his life and everyone in it. Mama says he even has God in his hip pocket. This boy will watch Grampy and learn the trick. That God thing just might be the key.” Her rendering of the deeply disturbed and unexpectedly complex John Daniel is particularly riveting, and she manages to wring a horror novel’s worth of tension from his relationships over the course of the tale. Rocky is more familiar fare: a genre detective in a book that isn’t really a genre offering, though he provides a welcome change of pace from some of the story’s more brooding sections. Threading through the work is a strong religious theme, which is more effective in explaining some of the characters’ motivations than it is at supplying a philosophical underpinning for the events. The tone vacillates from sections of polished verisimilitude to clunky encounters—reminiscent, in some ways, of Maine’s best known writer of dark tales, Stephen King. There are elements here that feel coincidental or contrived, and John Daniel’s psychology might not square exactly with one found in a profiler’s manual. But Baumgardner weaves an unorthodox mystery tale that will keep readers invested through the fallow periods and surprising time jumps.
A well-told, if idiosyncratic, family drama with an unsolved killing at its center.Pub Date: April 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-09-570150-8
Page Count: 445
Publisher: Encircle Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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