The ancient diary is marginally more entertaining than the contemporary romantic mystery, which is neither very romantic nor...
On the Isle of Capri, classical scholars compete against cult members searching for a long-lost Pythagorean manuscript in the latest from Goodman (The Sonnet Lover, 2007, etc.), who specializes in mysteries polished with a patina of highbrow culture.
Classics professor Sophie Chase is attending a department meeting at the University of Texas when the crazed boyfriend of her prized student Agnes, a beautiful small-town innocent, comes in shooting. The department secretary and a professor die. The meeting concerned a trip to Capri being organized by Sophie’s former mentor, and lover, Elgin, to research an important manuscript recently discovered in a house under excavation. Soon Sophie, at Elgin’s prodding, takes the place of her dead colleague on the expedition. In Italy, as first-century historian Phineas Aulus’s unbelievably detailed diary is translated daily for the researchers, readers are treated to a sordid story of sexual/religious rites in the days before the Vesuvius eruption. Meanwhile Elgin (whose sister was lost to a cult) warns Sophie that the FBI has informed him that someone from the Tetraktys, a creepy, possibly violent cult of devotees to the teachings of Pythagoras, has infiltrated the research team. Sophie has connections to Tetraktys. Her great love Ely disappeared into the Tetraktys compound years ago, although she blames her affair with Elgin as much as the cult for their breakup. Sophie doesn’t completely trust Elgin, whom she assumes is dallying with Agnes, and finds herself attracted to her wealthy host, who’s funding the project. When Agnes and Simon, another researcher, are trapped in the excavated tunnels, Agnes barely escapes with her own life. Simon dies in the hospital. Then Ely shows up claiming he has left the cult and with warnings of his own for Sophie. Whom can she trust? Readers will decipher the answer early on. For a professor, Sophie is slow on the uptake.
The ancient diary is marginally more entertaining than the contemporary romantic mystery, which is neither very romantic nor mysterious.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-345-47960-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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