In an effort to mix literary stylishness with gothic convention, Klavan (True Crime, 1995, etc.) stuffs an American film director into a badly padded English ghost story. When told that he has a brain tumor, Richard Storm, 40, who has directed more than 20 successful Hollywood horror films, abandons his work, moves to London, and joins the two-man staff of Bizarre!, a magazine about the paranormal that he respects and that may actually lead him to a few hard facts in proof of an afterlife. The staff: middle-aged Harper Albright, who smokes a death's-head meerschaum pipe and carries a sword cane, and her seemingly gay son Bernard, a computer whiz. Then Storm finds himself falling for Sophia Endering, a young woman almost half his age, who helps her wealthy father, Sir Michael, run an art gallery. Sophia is confronted by a Resurrectionist, who tells her that he will be murdered that night and that whoever buys a panel from the famous Rhinehart triptych of the Holy Family (soon going up for auction at Sotheby's) will be his killer. The triptych, an art treasure looted by German occultists who were helping to guide Hitler, has just surfaced. When Sir Michael sends Sophia to Sotheby's with instructions to buy the panel at any price, Sophia thinks her father a murderer, goes batty, and tries to hang herself. Storm arrives at just that moment, though, to save her. The two fall in love but soon find themselves fending off Saint Iago, a devil incarnate and the father of Bernard, who once murdered his entire band of followers (and who must sacrifice his own children to maintain eternal youth). What's he after? A formula for longevity that's encoded in the Rhinehart triptych. A cocktail of the feisty and the fusty, flavored with bitters by Bernard but with too much sweet vermouth and too watery by half.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-609-60112-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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