Let’s hope Rowling’s next book is sharper and shorter.
J.K. Rowling returns with her fourth pseudonymous mystery, putting Cormoran Strike and his now–partner in detecting, Robin Ellacott, in the middle of a scheme involving blackmail, murder, and the House of Commons.
Fans have had to wait three years for the latest Galbraith (Career of Evil, 2015, etc.) novel, but the book picks up exactly where the last installment left off, with Strike arriving late to Robin’s wedding, just after she says “I do” to her odious fiance, Matthew. Strike had recently fired Robin from her job at his private detective agency, worried about her safety after a serial killer tried to make her his next victim, and Robin is more concerned with whether he’s going to hire her back than about making sure the wedding guests are enjoying themselves. Not-really-spoiler-alert: He is. Flash-forward a year, and the agency is prospering when a mentally ill man named Billy shows up with a half-coherent story about having witnessed something terrible when he was a child: “I seen a kid killed…strangled.” Soon after, Jasper Chiswell (pronounced “Chizzle,” in the obscure way of the English upper class), the Minister for Culture, hires Strike to find dirt on two people he says are blackmailing him: Geraint Winn, whose wife is another government minister, and Jimmy Knight, who, not coincidentally, is the brother of Billy, whose story Strike had been looking into. Robin goes undercover in Chiswell’s office, where we meet a variety of the minister’s colleagues, friends, and family members. Rowling keeps many balls up in the air—perhaps too many considering the dead body that gets the book off the ground doesn’t show up until Page 281. There are still another 366 pages to go, and much of that length is a slog. Robin, who can be a great character, spends way too much time wondering what to do about her personal life—for the fourth book in a row. The mystery itself is complex, which is good, verging on convoluted, which is not. There are pleasures to be had, as in Rowling’s jokes on her uber-posh characters: “ ‘Steady on, old chap,’ said [Chiswell’s son-in-law], something that Robin had never thought to hear outside a book.” But there’s way too much filler in between.
Let’s hope Rowling’s next book is sharper and shorter.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-42273-4
Page Count: 650
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
