In this intriguing and unusual tale, a stunning departure from Gentill’s period mysteries (Give the Devil His Due, 2015,...
Two authors’ lives intersect in a strange and mysterious way.
Madeleine d’Leon, a lawyer married to well-liked doctor Hugh Lamond, puts aside the successful historical mystery series she’s written when she becomes obsessed with telling the story of a new character, Edward “Ned” McGinnity, a wealthy young author whose whole family was killed in a car crash. The accident has colored his life, and its shadow has appeared in all his work. Slowly Madeleine creates Ned’s life, including his love for artist Willow Meriwether, who considers him only her best friend since she remains in love with her boorish artist husband. At Willow’s gallery opening, she’s approached by Geoffrey Vogel, a critic with no love for her work. His editing of Ned’s first novel ruined it, and both Willow and Ned are natural suspects when Vogel is found dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs at the gallery. In the meantime, Ned has begun writing a novel in which Madeleine is the protagonist. He introduces her sadness over several miscarriages and the slow cooling of her relationship with her husband, who forces her to see a psychiatrist because he fears she’s so obsessed with her hero that she spends all her time writing and even having conversations with the fictionalized Ned. Madeleine suspects her husband of harboring a real-life secret, perhaps an affair, but her own life is taken up with writing Ned’s story and discovering who murdered Vogel. As Ned continues to work on his novel, detailing his problems with Willow and the horrors of being suspected of murder, his love for Madeleine grows. It becomes ever harder to determine what is truth and what is fiction in the intertwining stories of murder, love, and obsession.
In this intriguing and unusual tale, a stunning departure from Gentill’s period mysteries (Give the Devil His Due, 2015, etc.), the question is not whodunit but who’s real and who’s a figment of someone’s vivid imagination.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0914-7
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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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