Every bit as entertaining as it is sophisticated and elusive.
The search for an antique pocket watch animates a surprisingly dramatic battle of wits and wills, in an engaging intellectual thriller, only the second novel from the formidably gifted author of the 1992 critical success A Case of Curiosities.
Narrator Alexander Short, a toiler in the reference department of the New York Public Library, finds his placid life interrupted one day by a dapper elder patron improbably named Henry James Jesson III. Jesson is an art collector and independent scholar with an agenda, for which he enlists Alexander’s investigative skills: the recovery of an (initially unidentified) object missing from an elegant wooden cabinet (another “case of curiosities,” as it happens) in his possession. Over the objections of his French wife “Nic” (who just barely registers as a presence in the story), Alexander is lured into Jesson’s web, consulting such odd people and institutions as a cupiditous watchmaker, a “curator of Judaica,” and a scholarly plutocrat’s Arcade of Obsolescence—discovering that what he seeks is a timepiece created for Marie Antoinette (and named, coincidentally, “The Grand Complication”). The intricacies multiply exponentially, in a deliciously mazelike house of fiction containing innumerable trapdoors, hidden compartments, and mutually reflecting mirrors—and Kurzweil takes it to a whole new level when Alexander begins to suspect he is not just Boswell to Jesson’s Johnson but, quite possibly, his employer’s creation: the unwilling protagonist of a story Jesson is telling to himself. This exuberantly brainy tale is further distinguished by a plethora of quaint and curious lore (relating to heraldry, horology, French history, library science, and miscellaneous arcana) and by suggestive echoes of both Oliver Twist and the Humbert-Quilty climactic confrontation in Lolita. And Kurzweil’s ineffably witty dialogue reads like the rich, strange fruit of an inspired collaboration between Henry James and Oscar Wilde.
Every bit as entertaining as it is sophisticated and elusive.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6603-9
Page Count: 360
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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