Irish chutzpah.
Nuala Anne McGrail Coyne, “singer, accountant, actress, detective, wife, mother, lover” and brilliant at the lot, is tasked in her tenth (Irish Crystal, 2006, etc.) with locating a lad likely lost somewhere in the wilds of Iraq.
The demands of family life are something terrible—two dogs, three kids, one of them nursing, to say nothing of a terminally besotted husband’s connubial needs. If a Galway lass is to search for a missing boy, it must be without stirring a gorgeous foot from her neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side. But when the parents of the idealistic, much-loved Desmond Doolin come calling with that bereft look in their eyes, Nuala Anne rises to the occasion by calling on her second sight, a “ding” made possible since, among her other talents, she is one of “the dark ones.” Meanwhile, hubby Dermot Michael pores over a World War II manuscript that tells the tale of Timmy Pat Clarke, Irish ambassador to Nazi Germany. Colorful as that is, it has little enough to do with vanished young Doolin, though in a tale so loosely plotted, digressions don’t matter. What does matter is adherence to the kitschy formula that’s earned Father Greeley his faithful fan base. Nuala Anne and Dermot Michael speak in stage-Oirish brogues, engage in a modicum of ratiocination, make protracted love and unabashedly, unwaveringly, unremittingly extol their kind as the Creator’s anointed.
Irish chutzpah.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-765-31586-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
Romance, suspense, mystery, and bawdy historical customs add up to a fine read.
A couple with a reputation for crime-solving becomes involved in an odd murder case in 1832 Scotland.
Kiera Gage, better known as Lady Darby, and her husband, Sebastian Gage (An Artless Demise, 2019, etc.), are among the five dozen guests the Duke and Duchess of Bowmont have invited to Twelfth Night festivities at an immense Gothic castle in the Scottish border country. Kiera’s first marriage—the source of the title she'd rather not use—made her both miserable and notorious for executing anatomical drawings for her cruel husband, but she’s more recently gained a reputation as a portrait artist, and the Duchess is her client. Each guest at the ball is given a costume to wear and a role to play; amusingly, the heavily pregnant Kiera is a nun. Although the Duke claims all his children as his own, several of them were actually sired by other men. When his third son, Lord Edward, offers a ghost tour, the Gages are happy to escape the ballroom until the group stumbles upon a dead body in the dungeons. Ravaged by rats and decomposition, the corpse is difficult to identify, but its gentlemanly attire suggests that it may be Helmswick, the husband of the duke's daughter Lady Eleanor, who left for Paris a month ago. The ducal couple beg the Gages to investigate while withholding vital information. Lady Eleanor was unhappy with Helmswick, a man of many secrets and mistresses, and she’s commenced an affair with her first love, the Marquess of Marsdale. After the guests who were not at the castle when the murder occurred are permitted to depart, a disconcerting number of suspects remain behind. Kiera knows she’s touched a nerve when someone tries to push her down a flight of stairs. She and Gage must uncover many family secrets before they can unmask a killer.
Romance, suspense, mystery, and bawdy historical customs add up to a fine read.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-451-49138-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Even at less-than-peak performance, Mosley delivers enough good stuff to let you know a master’s at work.
If you’ve been wondering what Leonid McGill and his family private-eye business have been up to lately, how does trying to foil a billionaire’s murderous plot to conceal his black heritage sound to you?
The seemingly unstoppable Mosley (John Woman, 2018, etc.) shifts his restless vision back to contemporary New York City and to McGill, the ex-boxer who’s as agile at navigating both sides of the law as he was in the ring. Here, Mosley delves into the murky waters of history and racial identity as Leonid’s agency is asked by one Philip “Catfish” Worry, a 94-year-old African American blues musician from Mississippi, to help him to deliver a letter to the daughter of a wealthy, ruthless, and incorrigibly racist white banker saying that he's her great-grandfather because of an illicit liaison he had with the banker’s white mother. Sounds simple enough, but the aptly named Mr. Worry warns McGill that the banker is desperate enough to do anything within his considerable and far-reaching power to stop that information from getting to his daughter. (“One thing a poor sharecropper understands is that messin’ with rich white people is like tipplin’ poison.”) When his client is wounded three hours after he takes the case, Leonid calls upon every resource available to carry out his assignment, including various characters scattered throughout Manhattan who are somehow beholden to him, whether it’s a physician recovering from opioid addiction or an ill-tempered NYPD captain who dispenses the kind of stern-but-friendly admonitions police detectives have given private eyes since the days of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. Watching McGill coolly deploy the physical and intellectual skills he’d acquired in his previous life as an underworld “fixer” provides the principal pleasure of this installment, along with Mosley’s own way of making prose sound like a tender, funny blues ballad. (At one point he says a character is “as country as a bale of cotton on an unwilling child’s back.”) But there isn’t much more than that to this mystery, which is far less complex than its setup promises.
Even at less-than-peak performance, Mosley delivers enough good stuff to let you know a master’s at work.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-49113-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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