The overwhelming sadness of the events in both stories is leavened by the matter-of-fact firmness with which Vine measures...
Vine’s 14th (The Birthday Present, 2009, etc.) is a novel within a novel—well, within a novella, anyway—in which both tales revolve around a straight woman’s unexpected relationship with a gay man.
Unexpectedly pregnant after a one-night stand with James Derain, her brother’s lover, Ph.D. student Grace Easton takes refuge from her troubles—her brother Andrew’s cool reception to the news, his and James’ involvement as witnesses to a brutal hate crime—by rereading The Child’s Child, a novel written by her architect friend Toby’s late father, Martin Greenwell. Although Martin had been the well-regarded author of 12 novels, The Child’s Child, written in 1951, lay unpublished for half a century, unpublishable for much of that time because of its frank (for then) account of homosexual passion. The passion in question is Bristol biology teacher John Goodwin’s selfless love for office clerk Bertie Webber, a love that dare not speak its name in 1929. Hopelessly besotted with Bertie, John vows to give him up in response to a crisis in his family: his 15-year-old sister Maud’s pregnancy by a friend’s forgettable brother. When their parents banish Maud from their home, John matches an ingenious solution to her troubles: He’ll take her to his new place in Dartcombe, introduce her as his wife and shield her from reprobation. Readers would sense the impending approach of unwanted complications even if Vine weren’t really Ruth Rendell (The St. Zita Society, 2012, etc.). Suffice it to say that Bertie proves miserably unworthy of John’s devotion; the pressures of Maud’s uneventful life have a profound impact on her character; and the brief return to the present-day story of Grace Easton provides just the right sense of balance and conclusion.
The overwhelming sadness of the events in both stories is leavened by the matter-of-fact firmness with which Vine measures them out. Not even fans who expect more felonies will be able to put this one down.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9489-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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