Less might have been more in this increasingly convoluted fusion of history and fantasy centered on an ambiguous central...
A woman with a shameful past, now in search of revenge and her family’s forgiveness, finds herself assisting an irascible patron of the arts who is building one of the world’s great private art collections. But will his paintings ever be hers?
Inspired by the story of Philadelphia’s famed Barnes Foundation but fictionalized with a sizeable swirl of sensationalism, Shapiro’s (The Muralist, 2015, etc.) latest art-world novel spans three timelines involving Belgian Paulien Mertens, who grew up in a home graced by a collection of valuable art, including seven modern works by groundbreaking postimpressionists including Cézanne and Matisse. As the novel opens in Paris in 1922, Paulien, aged 19, has been banished from her home and family, which has been bankrupted in a Ponzi scheme launched by her fiancé, George Everard. Flashing back periodically to 1920, the novel shows how innocent Paulien fell into George’s trap; flashing forward to 1928, it reveals her reincarnated as Vivienne Gregsby, on trial for the murder of Dr. Edwin Bradley, a rich American chemist who was amassing a vast collection of postimpressionist art, including those seven Mertens paintings which Paulien dreams of restoring to her father. The central 1922 thread traces Paulien’s rebirth as Vivenne, her developing involvement with Bradley, and her move to the U.S. and yearning to inherit his collection herself. But whether flirting—and sleeping—with Matisse, palling around with Gertrude Stein, reuniting dubiously with George, or plotting in secret against Bradley, Paulien is a character short on both conviction and charm. And as the tale enters a late, repetitive spiral of machinations, a credulity-stretching mood intensifies.
Less might have been more in this increasingly convoluted fusion of history and fantasy centered on an ambiguous central figure.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61620-358-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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
A terrifying page-turner with the complexities of fatherhood at its core.
The serial killer who terrorized a small British town by kidnapping and murdering five little boys has been locked up for over a decade. So who could have taken 6-year-old Neil Spencer?
"The first forty-eight hours following a disappearance are the most crucial." And yet one of those hours has gone by the time Neil's separated parents realize he never made it from his father's house to his mother's, a short walk he took alone. One of the main investigators of the crime is DI Pete Willis, who cracked a similar case years back and has never quite recovered from it, especially since one of the missing boys was never found. Is there an accomplice still on the loose? As Willis and his colleagues comb the town for clues about the disappearance, a recently widowed novelist and his young son move into what they don't yet know is called "the scary house." Jake is a bright but isolated child who has relied heavily on an imaginary friend and a Packet of Special Things for comfort since he came home from school one day to find his mother's lifeless body at the foot of the stairs. This move is meant to be a much-needed fresh start for the grieving and bewildered father and son, but from the start nothing goes right. On Jake's first day at his new school, the other children draw him into discussion about the missing boy and the Whisper Man who took him. Soon enough, Jake hears whispering too. North's novel pits nasty men submerged in evil against decent men struggling to do good; several father-son pairs reflect the challenges and darker possibilities of this relationship, though plotlines involving female characters are a bit undeveloped.
A terrifying page-turner with the complexities of fatherhood at its core.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31799-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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