A host of complex, well-drawn characters and a strong story make up for a slight tendency to overdo the magic realism in a...
Hoffman, a gifted writer who's been treading water lately (Local Girls, 1997, etc.), is in much better form with this compelling portrait of class tensions and personal longings in the small-town Massachusetts.
Since 1858, the Haddan School has educated the children of the wealthy, who barely notice the village residents. More than 50 years after local girl Annie Howe, unhappily married to the school’s womanizing headmaster, hung herself from the rafters of the girls’ dormitory, town-gown fraternizing still seems a bad idea. Three new arrivals, though, quickly upset the smug status quo. Carlin Leander, transported from working-class Florida on a swimming scholarship, catches the fancy of handsome Harry McKenna, nasty top dog among the popular students. Betsy Chase, hired as photography instructor because she’s engaged to ambitious history teacher Eric Herman, finds herself attracted to Abe Grey, a town cop with a checkered past. And Gus Pierce, a brilliant but troubled new student, defies the vicious hazing (led by Harry) to which the faculty turns a blind eye. When Gus’s body is discovered in the river, everyone wants to sweep the matter under the rug. But Abe needs to honor the legacy of his upright grandfather, purge his bitter knowledge of the town’s current corruption, and redeem the sorrow of his brother’s long-ago suicide, as well as Annie Howe’s. He persists, and some measure of justice is meted out to the guilty, though there’s plenty of suffering for the innocent as well. Hoffman balances a biting depiction of Haddan’s snobbery and moral failures with her usual breathtakingly beautiful evocations of the natural world (laid on a little thick here). Her appealing protagonists find happiness, and a series of supernatural events suggest the existence of a higher order that will not allow evil to prevail . . . entirely.
A host of complex, well-drawn characters and a strong story make up for a slight tendency to overdo the magic realism in a novel sure to please Hoffman’s many fans.Pub Date: July 17, 2000
ISBN: 0-399-14599-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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