It's 1901, and master chef/sometime sleuth Auguste Didier is honeymooning in England with his Romanov princess bride Tatiana (Murder Makes an Entree, 1996, etc.). The two have been invited to Yorkshire for a weekend at Tabor Hall, home of the high-society Tabor family, with King Edward in attendance, to celebrate the engagement of Victoria Tabor to Tatiana's cousin Alexander Tully- Rich. Lady Priscilla Tabor, an ahead-of-her-time antismoking fanatic, banishes cigar fanciers to an outbuilding called the Smokehouse. It's there, late on Saturday night, that a man's body is found, shot to death—his identity a mystery. After the King quietly exits the scene, Didier, between forays to the kitchen, where the family cook presides over typical Yorkshire fare, gives what help he can to old friend Chief Inspector Rose of Scotland Yard. False trails abound as Lady Priscilla, her husband Baron George, his mother the Dowager Lady Miriam, his sister Laura, and her would-be suitor Oliver Carstairs, among others, are questioned at tiresome length, even as other avenues are being explored. The answers, when they finally arrive, have roots in a long-hidden past. Didier, whose patrician wife has decided to become an auto mechanic, must also confront a personal threat from Pyotr Gregorin, a relative of Tatiana's, enraged by her marriage to a commoner. Good-natured nonsense heavily embroidered with fancy prose, cooking lore, Yorkshire eccentrics, local accents, and crazed aristocrats. Patient readers with a fondness for the period may enjoy. For others, a tangled web laced with tedium.
Pub Date: Aug. 13, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15598-0
Page Count: 312
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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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