A delightful first entry in an offbeat mystery series.
This genteel historical mystery proves that even during a natural disaster, there’s room for a fiendish murder.
In Still’s (Shadow of Twilight, 2003) first novel in her Galveston Hurricane series, she deftly introduces readers to her plucky heroine, Dash Gallagher, the Texas city’s first female attorney. She lost her husband and her home last year in the Great Storm of 1900, yet she still works hard to rebuild her practice; meanwhile, she suffers from migraines and strives to adopt two young girls, Teddie and Jinxie, who are orphans like herself. It’s been a struggle for Dash to establish her identity in a changing world: “As an attorney, I might have a man’s job, but I was a lady, a respectable lady....I would be a mother as soon as the judge signed the adoption papers.” To complicate her already busy life, a promising new client named Larisa Dorfman, an estranged member of a wealthy Russian immigrant family, is found drowned near the docks. Dash teams up with her landlord, a Scottish detective named Mr. Barker, to investigate her death, which they soon determine was murder. Author Still expertly interjects social commentary into Dash’s reasoning for needing to solve the case: “I can’t sit around and wait for press stories and whispers to ruin my reputation. I plan to find out who killed her so I can be done with the whole thing.” The author adeptly steers the squabbling duo down a dangerous path as they search for Larisa’s murderer and for a “mystical” treasure sought by the patriarch of the dead woman’s family. Along the way, the pair’s platonic relationship heads toward something more. Still effectively uses the bleak setting of storm-ravaged Galveston as a backdrop and does an equally impressive job of creating memorable secondary characters, such as Dash’s nosy, lady-reporter friend MJ Quakenbush and the members of the snobbish, secretive Karparov clan. The author paces the mystery well, maintaining the feel of a slower era without forfeiting any narrative momentum.
A delightful first entry in an offbeat mystery series.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-615-46689-7
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Gone Feral Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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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