Witty and stimulating, albeit demanding, entertainment.
The Edgar Award winner’s serial protagonist Benjamin Weaver (The Whiskey Rebels, 2008, etc.) grapples with financial chicanery and diversified villains in 18th-century London.
Someone has provoked the vengeful ire of wealthy Jerome Cobb, who engages Benjamin, a burly thieftaker and constable for hire (think Dog the Bounty Hunter with a more elevated habit of speech and a courtlier demeanor), to look into the suspicious death of one Absalom Pepper—whose sole known characteristic, apparently, is his ridiculous name. As Benjamin plies his unauthorized trade, gentlemanly and socially insignificant bad guys pop up everywhere, sorely testing his brains and brawn (he’s also an expert pugilist). Some of Benjamin’s best friends and dearest relations, it turns out, have made the unstable Cobb’s ever-lengthening enemies list. For example, Benjamin’s beloved uncle Miguel Lienzo, a prosperous importer who himself played detective most engagingly in The Coffee Trader (2003), has seen a costly cargo of wine “lost” while being shipped from Europe to England. As the plots thicken, blood is spilled, beautiful women are compromised; the powerful East India Company is victimized by commercial espionage; and almost everybody’s trusted servant seems to be working for a minimum of two masters. The signature flaw in the author’s impressively erudite series is his passion to educate us. So much specific historical, cultural, industrial and commercial information is crammed into this otherwise streamlined narrative that the reader’s brain seizes up in self-defense, hoping to avert overload; in the process, alas, it’s easy to get lost from chapter to chapter. Reading Liss is almost as much of a task as a pleasure, but it is a pleasure, and for those who hang in there, the rewards are quite considerable.
Witty and stimulating, albeit demanding, entertainment.Pub Date: July 14, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6419-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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