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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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