A lightweight, old-fashioned private-eye series starter with a rather sweet conclusion.
Blank debuts with an old-fashioned detective story featuring gumshoe Sonny Knight.
Sonny’s small office in Bay Town sits “seventeen steps above a shoe store” with no elevator. The Panama-hat–wearing private eye has an indomitable sense of justice but no use for computers; fortunately, his assistant/receptionist Cookie is adept in the latter area. One day, 60-something Hortense Oglethorpinger, cane in hand, crosses his threshold, asking him to look into two strange occurrences: why she’s been fired as the Tuesday night piano player at the Go Fly a Kite bar and grill and why she hasn’t yet received an expected inheritance. Why, Sonny wonders, has Miss Oglethorpinger been paid $100 every Tuesday when it’s an open-mic night at the bar, when nobody else gets paid? Sonny decides to have a chat with his police-detective buddies at the station, where he learns about three women who have disappeared from Bay Town without a trace. The police need his help to track them down, and the possible rescue of three women seems far more interesting than the tribulations of the recently unemployed Miss Oglethorpinger. Sonny’s adventure eventually lands him in the emergency room—twice—and also provides him with a love interest. This first-person narrative is a breezy throwback to older entries in the private-eye genre, and it has a few surprising, albeit improbable, plot twists that keep the action going just when it seems as if it should be wrapping up. Sonny is also a contagiously likable character despite his affected, chauvinist attitude toward Cookie (calling her “Angel” and “Sugar”). He has a sense of bravado, though, that may have some readers rolling their eyes: “When I see a wrong, I want to right it. I have principles that I live by, and I don’t waver from them when it’s convenient to do so.”
A lightweight, old-fashioned private-eye series starter with a rather sweet conclusion.Pub Date: June 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5466-8505-0
Page Count: 210
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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