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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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