Fans who still mourn the passing of Agatha Christie, the model who’s evoked here in dozens of telltale details, will welcome...
A preternaturally brainy novel within a novel that’s both a pastiche and a deconstruction of golden-age whodunits.
Magpie Murders, bestselling author Alan Conway’s ninth novel about Greek/German detective Atticus Pünd, kicks off with the funeral of Mary Elizabeth Blakiston, devoted housekeeper to Sir Magnus Pye, who’s been found at the bottom of a steep staircase she’d been vacuuming in Pye Hall, whose every external door was locked from the inside. Her demise has all the signs of an accident until Sir Magnus himself follows her in death, beheaded with a sword customarily displayed with a full suit of armor in Pye Hall. Conway's editor, Susan Ryeland, does her methodical best to figure out which of many guilty secrets Conway has provided the suspects in Saxby-on-Avon—Rev. Robin Osborne and his wife, Henrietta; Mary’s son, Robert, and his fiancee, Joy Sanderling; Joy’s boss, surgeon Emilia Redwing, and her elderly father; antiques dealers Johnny and Gemma Whitehead; Magnus’ twin sister, Clarissa; and Lady Frances Pye and her inevitable lover, investor Jack Dartford—is most likely to conceal a killer, but she’s still undecided when she comes to the end of the manuscript and realizes the last chapter is missing. Since Conway in inconveniently unavailable, Susan, in the second half of the book, attempts to solve the case herself, questioning Conway’s own associates—his sister, Claire; his ex-wife, Melissa; his ex-lover, James Taylor; his neighbor, hedge fund manager John White—and slowly comes to the realization that Conway has cast virtually all of them as fictional avatars in Magpie Murders and that the novel, and indeed Conway’s entire fictional oeuvre, is filled with a mind-boggling variety of games whose solutions cast new light on murders fictional and nonfictional.
Fans who still mourn the passing of Agatha Christie, the model who’s evoked here in dozens of telltale details, will welcome this wildly inventive homage/update/commentary as the most fiendishly clever puzzle—make that two puzzles—of the year.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-264522-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Wickedly sharp, if not altogether pleasant, it’s a near-perfect realization of a singular vision—and definitely not for...
A viciously funny bloodbath eviscerating the rarefied world of elite creative writing programs, Awad’s latest may be the first (and only?) entry into the canon of MFA horror.
Samantha Heather Mackey is the single outsider among her fiction cohort at Warren University, which is populated by Bunnies. “We call them Bunnies,” she explains, “because that is what they call each other.” The Bunnies are uniform in their Bunniness: rich and hyperfeminine and aggressively childlike, fawning over each other (“Can I just say I loved living in your lines and that’s where I want to live now forever?”), wearing kitten-printed dresses, frequenting a cafe where all the food is miniature, from the mini cupcakes to the mini sweet potato fries. Samantha is, by definition, not a Bunny. But then a note appears in her student mailbox, sinister and saccharine at once: an invitation to the Bunnies’ Smut Salon, one of their many Bunny customs from which Samantha has always been excluded, like “Touching Tuesdays” or “making little woodland creatures out of marzipan.” And even though she despises the Bunnies and their cooing and their cloying girlishness and incomprehensible stories, she cannot resist the possibility of finally, maybe being invited into their sweet and terrifying club. Smut Salon, though, is tame compared to what the Bunnies call their “Workshop,” which, they explain, is an “experimental” and “intertextual” project that “subverts the whole concept of genre,” and also “the patriarchy of language,” and also several other combinations of creative writing buzzwords. (“This is about the Body,” a Bunny tells Samantha, upon deeming her ready to participate. “The Body performing in all its nuanced viscerality.”) As Samantha falls deeper into their twee and terrifying world—drifting from her only non-Bunny friend in the process—Awad (13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, 2016) gleefully pumps up the novel’s nightmarish quality until the boundary between perception and reality has all but dissolved completely. It’s clear that Awad is having fun here—the proof is in the gore—and her delight is contagious.
Wickedly sharp, if not altogether pleasant, it’s a near-perfect realization of a singular vision—and definitely not for everyone.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55973-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
PROFILES
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
