Sanctimonious and then some, with much quoting of Scripture and gossip from the neighbors.
Steel magnolias kick butt.
It’s a dark and snowy night. The power is out and cars are stranded. Hazel Marie isn’t due for two more weeks, but her twins decide they’re ready right now. So Miss Julia (Miss Julia Renews Her Vows, 2010, etc.), Lillian and Etta Mae deliver them while the menfolk—Mr. Pickens, the daddy, and Sam, Miss Julia’s second husband—are off in Raleigh on business. They return to Abbotsville to colic and chaos. A body has been found in the schoolteacher Miss Petty’s tool shed, and Miss Julia is overdrawn at the bank because someone’s forged her name on stolen checks. Thurlow Jones, whose backyard abuts Miss Petty’s, insinuates that she often had gentlemen callers late at night. Was one of them Richard Stroud, the deceased, just recently paroled after financial shenanigans that cost Miss Julia $100,000? To find out, elderly, hyper-inquisitive Miss Julia reconnoiters the tool shed in the wee hours, drives Sam from their home by not confiding in him and sets tongues wagging about their relationship. The babies cry. The babies need changing. The babies settle down with pacifiers. Through it all, Miss Julia befriends Pastor Poppy, the new assistant pastor, who convinces Thurlow that women have a place in the ministry.
Sanctimonious and then some, with much quoting of Scripture and gossip from the neighbors.Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02255-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
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