In its best moments, a Canadian Anatomy of a Murder. A savvy, stylish, and very entertaining debut.
Canadian author Pyper's highly successful first novel (a huge bestseller Up North) is a teasing mystery that blossoms into a nailbiting courtroom drama, seasoned with a carefully measured soupçon of the supernatural.
The story begins with a beautiful bit of misdirection: a terse `prologue` that shows a teenaged boy and girl, who are cousins, `making out` in a canoe, which tips over, with disastrous results. The reader assumes (only half-correctly) that this incident is linked to the occurrence that brings burnt-out attorney Bartholomew Crane to the drab Ontario town of Murdoch, where two popular high-school girls have disappeared, and are presumed dead, at the hand of their English teacher (and secretive companion): `Barth's` sullen client Thomas Tripp. Crane's efforts to defend the uncommunicative Tripp (to whom circumstantial evidence points damningly) lead him to interviews with both missing girls' fathers (one a smiling blank, the other a vengeful religious zealot), the town's well-informed head librarian-newspaper editor, and a forthright old lady, Helen Arthurs, who fills Crane in on a weird local legend: the story of `Murdoch's Loch Ness Monster,` a distraught mental patient (and war refugee) who, having lost custody of her children, drowned in a nearby lake, and has since purportedly `returned,` to `take` other people's children, to replace her own lost ones. Inevitably, there's a mystery in the brooding Bartholomew Crane's past, which Pyper connects—smashingly—with the several mysteries of Murdoch, as the novel drives toward its (truly) surprising conclusion. Lost Girls borrows an important (though, to be fair, not crucial) plot detail from Peter Straub's Ghost Story, and its case is weakened by a single glaring improbability: the ease with which everyone here assumes the missing girls' deaths, though no bodies are in evidence (it seems more than just possible they might be runaways). No matter. Pyper quickly builds, and skillfully maintains a full head of increasingly suspenseful steam, and keeps the reader off balance, and hooked, throughout.
In its best moments, a Canadian Anatomy of a Murder. A savvy, stylish, and very entertaining debut.Pub Date: May 16, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-33446-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
IN THE NEWS
Looks like Neal Carey, the peripatetic agent of that free- lance justice troop Friends of the Family, will never get back to New York to write his dissertation on Tobias Smollett. This time he's sprung from three years in a Chinese monastery (The Trail to Buddha's Mirror, 1992) only to be sent undercover as a ranch-hand in the Nevada plains to scout out the Sons of Seth, a white- supremacist flock that's his best hope for locating two-year-old Cody McCall, snatched from his Hollywood mother during a paternal weekend. Neal settles in deep, of course, and his ritual ordeals- -having to sell out the rancher who took him in, breaking off his romance with tough schoolmarm Karen Hawley, going up against rotten-apple Cal Strekker, getting ordered to kill his Friendly mentor Joe Graham—are as predictable as the trademark dose of mysticism as the bodies pile up, and as the certainty that when the dust settles, Neal won't be back at school. Winslow's Aryan crazies don't have the threatening solidity of Stephen Greenleaf's (Southern Cross, p. 1102 ), but Neal's latest adventure is full of entertaining derring-do.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09934-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
O'Brien proves to be the Oliver Stone of literature, reiterating the same Vietnam stories endlessly without adding any insight. Politician John Wade has just lost an election, and he and his wife, Kathy, have retired to a lakeside cabin to plan their future when she suddenly disappears. O'Brien manages to stretch out this simple premise by sticking in chapters consisting of quotes from various sources (both actual and fictional) that relate to John and Kathy. An unnamed author — an irritating device that recalls the better-handled but still imperfect "Tim O'Brien" narrator of The Things They Carried (1990) — also includes lengthy footnotes about his own experiences in Vietnam. While the sections covering John in the third person are dry, these first-person footnotes are unbearable. O'Brien uses a coy tone (it's as though he's constantly whispering "Ooooh, spooky!"), but there is no suspense: The reader is acquainted with Kathy for only a few pages before her disappearance, so it's impossible to work up any interest in her fate. The same could be said of John, even though he is the focus of the book. Flashbacks and quotes reveal that John was present at the infamous Thuan Yen massacre (for those too thick-headed to understand the connection to My Lai, O'Brien includes numerous real-life references). The symbolism here is beyond cloying. As a child John liked to perform magic tricks, and he was subsequently nicknamed "Sorcerer" by his fellow soldiers — he could make things disappear, get it? John has been troubled for some time. He used to spy on Kathy when they were in college, and his father's habit of calling the chubby boy "Jiggling John" apparently wounded him. All of this is awkwardly uncovered through a pretentious structure that cannot disguise the fact that there is no story here. Sinks like a stone.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 061870986X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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