Interesting, persuasive characters populate a couple of strained, overelaborate plots. Still, a good read for Granger’s many...
Bamford Foreign Service worker Meredith Mitchell and Police Superintendent Alan Markby (Beneath These Stones, 2000, etc.), still unmarried, are now sharing bed and board. A casual meeting on her train commute introduces Meredith to Jan Oakley—young, handsome, fresh from Poland, but somehow smarmy. He claims to be the great-grandson of Bamford’s William Oakley, who a century before was acquitted of the arsenic poisoning of his wife Cora. The family is now reduced to Damaris and Florence, two elderly sisters preparing to sell the crumbling mansion and the expansive acreage at Fourways, the ancestral home, and move to smaller quarters. As the story shuttles back and forth from 1890 to the present, Jan arrives at Fourways, where the sisters barely tolerate him as their guest and are alarmed by his claim of a will entitling him to half the profits from the estate’s sale to builder Dudley Newman. Jan dies, however, before the sale can be completed—an apparent victim of the arsenic that gardener Ron Gladstone found in an old potting shed on the grounds. Markby and right-hand man Dave Pearce have been superseded on the case by Superintendent Minchin and Inspector Hayes from London, but it will take lots of help from Markby and other locals before the overly complex events leading to Jane’s demise are uncovered.
Interesting, persuasive characters populate a couple of strained, overelaborate plots. Still, a good read for Granger’s many fans that may even make some new ones.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28445-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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
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