One of the most successful of prolific Perry’s recent Victorian melodramas. The opening chapters are appropriately...
Cmdr. William Monk, of the Thames River Police, agrees to join a distraught husband in the ransom exchange for his kidnapped wife only to find every conceivable thing going disastrously wrong in Perry’s latest slice of Victorian skulduggery.
When his wife, Kate, is lured away from her cousin Celia Darwin, who’s joined her for lunch in Battersea Park, wealthy developer Harry Exeter is perfectly willing to pay the enormous sum her kidnappers demand even if it means exhausting his own resources and tapping into an inheritance Maurice Latham, another cousin, is holding in trust for Kate for another 18 months. Because the criminals have appointed dark, treacherous Jacob’s Island as the place to trade their victim for the ransom, Exeter’s attorney, Sir Oliver Rathbone, suggests that his old friend Monk accompany him, and Monk himself handpicks five members of the TRP to join them: officers Bathurst, Laker, Marbury, Walcott, and Hooper, his second-in-command. Upon their arrival at Jacob’s Island, the party is ambushed by a crew that makes off with the money, leaving behind the brutally slashed corpse of Kate Exeter. Since their assailants clearly knew in advance the precise movements of Monk and his team, Monk (An Echo of Murder, 2017, etc.) is forced to concede that one of his own men may have betrayed him. As he struggles to fix the guilt on one of them (bantam street fighter Walcott? Bathurst, whose family is eternally in financial straits? Hooper, whom he’d trusted more than once with his life?), two other murders follow, and John Hooper complicates matters even further by falling in love with Celia Darwin—an apparent tangent that will play a crucial role in precipitating the courtroom climax.
One of the most successful of prolific Perry’s recent Victorian melodramas. The opening chapters are appropriately portentous, the mystification is authentic, and if the final surprise isn’t exactly a shock, it’s so well-prepared that even readers who don’t gasp will nod in satisfaction.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-17991-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
IN THE NEWS
The perils of country living are brought to light in a confidently executed novel.
Family bonds are twisted and broken in Jordan’s meditation on the fallen South.
Debut novelist Jordan won the 2006 Bellwether Prize for this disquieting reflection on rural America, told from multiple perspectives. After steadfastly guarding her virginity for three decades, cosmopolitan Memphis schoolmarm Laura Chappell agrees to marry a rigid suitor named Henry McAllan, and in 1940 they have their first child. At the end of World War II, Henry drags his bride, their now expanded brood and his sadistic Pappy off to a vile, primitive farm in the backwaters of Mississippi that she names “Mudbound.” Promised an antebellum plantation, Laura finds that Henry has been fleeced and her family is soon living in a bleak, weather-beaten farmhouse lacking running water and electricity. Resigned to an uncomfortable truce, the McAllans stubbornly and meagerly carve out a living on the unforgiving Delta. Their unsteady marriage becomes more complicated with the arrival of Henry’s enigmatic brother Jamie, plagued by his father’s wrath, a drinking problem and the guilt of razing Europe as a bomber pilot. Adding his voice to the narrative is Ronsel Jackson, the son of one of the farm’s tenants, whose heroism as a tank soldier stands for naught against the racism of the hard-drinking, deeply bigoted community. Punctuated by an illicit affair, a gruesome hate crime and finally a quiet, just murder in the night, the book imparts misery upon the wicked—but the innocent suffer as well. “Sometimes it’s necessary to do wrong,” claims Jamie McAllan in the book’s equivocal dénouement. “Sometimes it’s the only way to make things right.”
The perils of country living are brought to light in a confidently executed novel.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56512-569-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
The parts with Nero Wolfe, the only character Goldsborough brings to life, are almost worth waiting for.
In Archie Goodwin's 15th adventure since the death of his creator, Rex Stout, his gossipy Aunt Edna Wainwright lures him from 34th Street to his carefully unnamed hometown in Ohio to investigate the death of a well-hated bank president.
Tom Blankenship, the local police chief, thinks there’s no case since Logan Mulgrew shot himself. But Archie’s mother, Marjorie Goodwin, and Aunt Edna know lots of people with reason to have killed him. Mulgrew drove rival banker Charles Purcell out of business, forcing Purcell to get work as an auto mechanic, and foreclosed on dairy farmer Harold Mapes’ spread. Lester Newman is convinced that Mulgrew murdered his ailing wife, Lester’s sister, so that he could romance her nurse, Carrie Yeager. And Donna Newman, Lester’s granddaughter, might have had an eye on her great-uncle’s substantial estate. Nor is Archie limited to mulling over his relatives’ gossip, for Trumpet reporter Verna Kay Padgett, whose apartment window was shot out the night her column raised questions about the alleged suicide, is perfectly willing to publish a floridly actionable summary of the leading suspects that delights her editor, shocks Archie, and infuriates everyone else. The one person missing is Archie’s boss, Nero Wolfe (Death of an Art Collector, 2019, etc.), and fans will breathe a sigh of relief when he appears at Marjorie’s door, debriefs Archie, notices a telltale clue, prepares dinner for everyone, sleeps on his discovery, and arranges a meeting of all parties in Marjorie’s living room in which he names the killer.
The parts with Nero Wolfe, the only character Goldsborough brings to life, are almost worth waiting for.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5988-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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