A contrived, deliciously complicated study of racism and what must be done to end it.
Moving away from his Colorado police procedural series (Pariah, 1999, etc.), Zigal offers a slow-moving, literate thriller examining the roots of racism in New Orleans.
For nearly 150 years, the Blanchard family has roasted New Orleans’ best cup of coffee. Though he’s bored with the family business, fortysomething company head Paul Blanchard is comfortably wealthy and well-known in the city’s highest social and power circles, when the repugnant, blatantly racist state Congressman Mike Morvant, Blanchard’s former Tulane University “frat buddy,” demands that Blanchard finance his gubernatorial run and talk Morvant up among the city’s elite. If he doesn’t, Morvant will reveal how he helped Blanchard cover up a terribly embarrassing situation from Blanchard’s wild and crazy years. Blanchard, a liberal Catholic married to a Jewish woman, is closer to his black housekeeper (and her son, currently serving a 30-year-sentence for murder) than he is to the members of his own dysfunctional family. He despises Morvant, though he’s intrigued when Morvant also demands that Blanchard secure the support of the White League, a secret society of upper-crust racists whose origins predate the Ku Klux Klan. Blanchard’s great-grandfather was a society member, way back during Reconstruction, and though it was thought to have died out, Blanchard’s gay, older brother has evidence that their late father was aware of it. Thus begins a rather windy, extravagantly detailed look at the Blanchard family’s problematic past, as well as the seamy origins of the city’s high society and, predictably, the convoluted ties that bind blacks, whites, Christians, Jews, Creoles, Cajuns in a simmering stew that differs from James Lee Burke’s gumbo in that it is told from the top down—as Blanchard, a child of privilege burdened by guilt, an unraveling marriage, and a daughter about to enter her own wild and crazy years, reexamines his roots and makes some risky decisions.
A contrived, deliciously complicated study of racism and what must be done to end it.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-59264-115-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Toby Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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