A richly textured, thoughtful whodunit with a moral bite.
The London Blitz makes an almost perfect coverup for murder in this labyrinthine mystery.
Diving out of a London townhouse after German bombs hit it during World War II, Rose Alyn looks back to see her cousin Rosalee racing for the door. She nearly makes it before a masked figure looms and clubs her to death. Motives abound. The newly minted widow of wealthy industrialist Claude van Arthur, Rosalee was gorgeous, selfish and cruel, an odious woman who made her servants give up their dairy rations for her milk bath. Plenty of relatives wanted her dead so they could get their hands on the van Arthur fortune, including a sister-in-law who pestered her with obscene phone calls and a brother-in-law who needed her cash to get out of an embezzlement charge. But a surprise will puts Rosalee and Claude’s entire estate in Rose’s hands. While she tries to solve the murder, she’s also in charge of administering the finances of the people who probably killed her cousin–and may try to kill her. This is a very British mystery–Rose and her Scotland Yard bodyguard Lucas spend lots of time in icily civil drawing-room interrogations, and the main occupation of most characters is the desperate jockeying for inheritances. Valberde tells the story at a luxuriant pace, and in building a sense of social milieu and physical setting, the author lingers over the niceties of trusts and estate planning and steeps readers in the details of country-house décor. The novel is also serious meditation on the corrupting power of beauty–as plain Rose takes over Rosalee’s position, the author makes her responsibility and usefulness a mirror image of her cousin’s glittering parasitism, a distinction that’s not lost on an RAF pilot Rose becomes entangled with. Valberde’s prose is subtle, perceptive and alive to psychological nuance. It turns an investigation of a woman’s death into a searching examination of her life.
A richly textured, thoughtful whodunit with a moral bite.Pub Date: March 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4259-8733-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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