Despite menacing characters and real atrocities, this mystery deflates.
On a run through the early morning mists of Geneva, Abby Monroe watches in horror as a woman falls from a balcony to her death. Was she pushed?
Stunned, Abby’s eyes are drawn to a gorgeous jeweled bracelet just as a man, a man who could be a murderer, leans over the balcony, sees her and gives chase. Strangely, when Abby notifies the police, the body is nowhere to be found. So, Abby puts the mysterious event behind her and continues on to Peshawar, Pakistan, to document vaccine statistics for the United Nations. Her sleep is filled with nightmares, and her bathroom crawls with cockroaches, yet Abby pulls herself together and begins to work with women and children desolated by natural and human disasters. Gately (Lipstick in Afghanistan, 2010) vividly depicts the appalling conditions of refugee camps, as well as the stories of women who have escaped sexual slavery, yet her heroine’s naïveté strains credulity. Despite having been dumped by her long-term boyfriend, lost a dream job and willingly accepted a job in a place even the U.N. euphemistically terms an unstable security situation (not to mention having witnessed a possible murder), Abby implicitly trusts everyone she meets. Her days are quickly populated by the refugees, Hana (the surly maid whose husband sold their child) and Najeela (the administrative assistant who wants to marry Lars, not an Afghan man chosen by her family). Into this world of women struggling to negotiate a world of terrorism and social oppression, Nick Sinclair arrives. Investigating conditions at the camps and allegations of human trafficking, Nick wants to interview Abby for a sidebar story. Although she inexplicably distrusts Nick, Abby has no one else to turn to when she finds the bracelet.
Despite menacing characters and real atrocities, this mystery deflates.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6912-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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