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BOUNDARY

Name: BOUNDARY
Author: Andrée Michaud
ISBN: 978-177196-109-7

THE LAST SUMMER

by Andrée Michaud ; translated by Donald Winkler ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 20, 2017

Spellbinding. This novel is no light read, and beneath its layers lies a vision profoundly rewarding, beautiful, and tragic.

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Quebec novelist Michaud (The River of Dead Trees, 2002, etc.) explores the devastating consequences of murder upon a close-knit community in this deeply psychological novel translated from the French.

Boundary, an Edenic summer destination for families both American and French-Canadian, is haunted by the story of a trapper named Pete Landry, whose obsession with a local woman ended in tragedy. Years later, in 1967, Landry’s legend lives on, and when two young women are savagely murdered, the vacationers fear that his ghost may still roam the woods and lakeshore. Chief Inspector Michaud, however, called in to investigate the crimes, knows that he is seeking flesh-and-blood evil. Can he and his officers uncover the truth before another girl dies? This is a novel about liminal spaces and liminal time: much of the action occurs in the evening and at night, and even the year in which it's set bridges the innocence and tumult of the 1960s. It's also a novel about coming-of-age: Andrée, who narrates some of the novel, is a young girl teetering on the brink of becoming a young woman, and she both celebrates and fears this transition. Most of all, it is a dense and beautiful novel about the human condition. The deaths of the girls, Zaza and Sissy, form the foundation of the mystery, but the author deliberately explores all aspects of loss, grief, desire, guilt, maturation, and obsession, and her writing is lyrical and layered. There is something haunting and fairy-tale–like in the wild setting and in the characters who inhabit and fear it. While most crime novels put the murder center stage, this one instead uses the crime to deeply examine the complexity of what it means to be alive. The one odd note is Michaud's use of her own name for both the detective and the young narrator, for reasons that never become clear, but that's a small quibble.

Spellbinding. This novel is no light read, and beneath its layers lies a vision profoundly rewarding, beautiful, and tragic.

Pub Date: June 20, 2017

ISBN: 978-177196-109-7

Page Count: 328

Publisher: Biblioasis

Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
EVIL BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
FIRE AND BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.