Scattershot and self-indulgent.
The consequences of a long-ago murder in New Zealand reverberate all the way to England in Weldon’s latest (Habits of the House, 2013, etc.).
Kehua are the Maori spirits of the wandering dead, and they seem to have followed Beverley to North London, where she is recuperating from a knee replacement and lending a skeptical ear to granddaughter Scarlet’s confidence that she is leaving her husband for a sexy but has-been movie star. “This running away habit can get compulsive,” her grandmother warns, and aging Beverley should know; she’s done a lot of it since she discovered her mother’s bloody corpse on the floor of their New Zealand home, killed by a jealous husband—or was it the lover who might be Beverley’s real father? Little is for certain in Weldon’s game-playing narrative, which keeps cutting away from the main story to a first-person commentary by the author in the midst of creating it, who thinks the basement where she writes may be haunted. The author’s preoccupation with the Victorian-era residents of her house isn’t terribly interesting, nor are her confidences about the process of writing fiction. There’s quite enough plot already in the complicated lives of Beverley and her restless descendants: daughter Alice, who found religion shortly after giving birth to Cynara, whose knee-jerk feminism and newfound lesbianism embarrass younger sister Scarlet and infuriate Cynara’s 16-year-old daughter, Lola, who’s a troublemaker all around. You know a writer is having trouble maintaining focus when she opens a chapter with the words, “Let me remind you.” Weldon remains a wickedly funny observer of the human comedy, and her portrait of four generations of women unsettled by spirits of whose existence they are unaware (the kehua: remember them?) is intermittently moving. But the late arrival of an unknown son and a second murder merely underscore Weldon’s lack of discipline and irritating confidence that every single word she writes is fascinating.
Scattershot and self-indulgent.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60945-137-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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