Powerful and empoweringly weird.
A grieving author, a mysterious painting, and an aging femme fatale of the Modernist set collide in Scotland with uncanny results.
This slender but richly evocative novella opens with its main character at a crossroads. Tuttle's unnamed narrator, a lifelong writer, is in the throes of a deep grief that has robbed her of her impetus to create. In the year and five months since her husband’s death, she has isolated herself in her coastal Scottish cottage, but now an invitation from her agent, Selwyn, as well as the pressing economic urgency of her dried-up income have brought her to Edinburgh to pitch a new project—if only she knew what it would be. A fortuitous stop at the National Gallery brings the narrator face-to-face with Circe, a favorite painting by fictional early 20th-century master W. E. Logan. The model for Circe was the enigmatic Helen Elizabeth Ralston, whose own novelistic career flashed like a meteor across the Modernist literary landscape and who has deeply influenced the narrator’s work. Still under the spell of Logan’s painting, a rendering of Circe among the swine, the narrator proposes to Selwyn that she will write a biography of Ralston, examining the truth of her tumultuous affair with Logan and the long career that followed the dissolution of their relationship. Selwyn’s connections bring the narrator to the home of Alistair Reid, an elderly collector who has in his possession a lost Ralston painting entitled “My Death,” which hides within it the key to the provocative mystery surrounding the true nature of Ralston and Logan’s relationship and the sudden, unexplained blindness that ended his career. The narrator sets out to interview Ralston, now in her mid-90s in Glasgow, but the answers she finds there threaten to destabilize everything she thought she knew about the literary world and her own life story. Full of twists and turns, the book conjures the rich inner lives of women working on the fringes of artistic communities that often forget to memorialize or acknowledge them, even as Tuttle keeps taut the thread of suspense that animates the story.
Powerful and empoweringly weird.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781681377728
Page Count: 144
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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