A pleasant, holiday-themed escape that offers more giggles than shivers.
A murderer is afoot in the peaceful hamlet of Christmas Village in Wescott’s (Running from Scissors, 2018) whimsical cozy.
It’s the week before Christmas, and an eclectic troupe of jugglers, magicians, acrobats, and other performers called Harper’s Harpoons has arrived at Rose Willoughby’s Plum Cottage, where they plan to lodge for the duration of the village’s famous celebratory week. The morning after their arrival, though, the group’s manager, Barnaby Snipes, is found dead atop pristine snow on 12-foot-high Plum Hill. There aren’t any footprints leading to or away from the body, but it’s confirmed that Barnaby was killed sometime after the snow had fallen. Sheriff Fell and Deputy Bentley are stumped, but the challenge proves irresistible to Maribel Claus, a member of the village’s Council of Elders and Rose’s good friend. In between baking tarts and other pastries, Maribel sets about trying to solve the mystery. Snipes has plenty of enemies, and among the suspects are Jimmy “Sticks” Johannsen, a juggler who walks on stilts; Eric Stumpf, a magician who’s talented at making things appear and disappear; acrobat Xander “Whirly” Byrd; professional psychic Madame Zorena; and strongman Bull Vargas. But before the sheriff can make an arrest, another body is found along with a new set of mysterious clues. Overall, this is a tongue-in-cheek romp through an idealized village where the snow “is softer and drier than...any other place,” the flowers “stay in bloom all year round,” and streets have names like “Candy Cane Lane” and “Blitzen Court.” As a result, the narrative may seem a bit too cute for some readers—even the most devoted fans of cozy mysteries; at one point, for instance, a clue is found by examining the frolicking games of a pair of pet ferrets named Dancer and Prancer. However, the tale also has plenty of entertainingly quirky characters, headed by Maribel, who proves to be an enjoyable sleuth who’s always a step ahead of the sheriff. There’s also plenty of puzzle-solving fun to be had for readers who can sink into the fantasy along with engaging twists and red herrings.
A pleasant, holiday-themed escape that offers more giggles than shivers.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73213-581-9
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Better Mousetrap Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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