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
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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