A giddy journey with an unforgettable sleuth to guide readers.
A clever amateur detective investigates a murder in this seriocomic mystery.
The tale’s narrator is Henrietta Florence Van Duyn Brigander, aka Granny Flamingo, aka The Mad Bird Lady of East 14th Street. Born into a wealthy and well-connected, if quirky, old family, she slipped into schizophrenia early on in life and has been on the streets or in psychiatric wards ever since. Now, someone in the mental illness ward at Mount Hebron hospital has been murdered. Henrietta is determined to find the killer, especially because she was sweet on the victim, Big George Currier. So it’s off to the races, all over Manhattan and Queens, while the Albanian Mafia may be out to kill her. Readers meet all sorts of street denizens worthy of Dickens, plus some sleazy bureaucrats and time servers: It is the Big Apple full bore. Eventually, Henrietta arrives at a possible solution that is outrageously improbable but somehow logical. The English philosopher William of Ockham would be proud of his acolyte. Appel is clearly having great fun, and Henrietta is a wonderful character. She was born to tell her story, just as Holden Caulfield and Ishmael were. She is talkative and adept at digressions, especially about the history of her illustrious family, piling anecdote upon anecdote. Anyway is her device for gulping for a breath in this cascade. Twins are a motif here. Big George and Little Abe were identical twins, and Henrietta and her deceased brother, Rusky, were fraternal twins (he was also schizophrenic, and he stepped into an empty elevator shaft). The author makes excellent use of this trope (see Shakespeare, et. al.). Besides the vivid Brigander family anecdotes are Henrietta’s intriguing cultural and historical allusions. The woman is a font of trivia and constantly annoyed that others are so clueless. This gives rise to the exhilarating book’s last 50-some pages, which are titled “Glossary of Things You Should Know…” and enlighten readers about all those allusions. Appel is a working psychiatrist (write what you know), among other things—he has picked up advanced degrees almost like a hobby.
A giddy journey with an unforgettable sleuth to guide readers.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73536-013-3
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Press Americana
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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