Wood wrote three occult novels in the 80's (Amy Girl, 1987, etc.), but her current publisher is promoting her as the author of Twins (1977)—a telling comment on a sagging career that may lift a bit with this vivid if formulaic mix of occult and serial-killer chills. This time, Wood's usual Lady Luckless is poor little rich girl Eve Klein, whose millions can't buy her relief from her other inheritance: the clairvoyant powers that have recently frightened off her husband, Sam. Hoping to confront him, Eve drives from her Connecticut estate to Sam's new house in Raven Lake, New York, where she's instantly felled by a vision of a woman mutilated and dying—the handiwork of local sociopath Adam Fuller, M.D., whose eyes (``empty...dead...glassy. Like a doll's eyes'') give away his utter inability to feel for others, the product of a buried childhood trauma: Fuller kills in the barren hope of feeling pity for his victims. Eve's call to the cops snares homicide legend Dave Latovsky, who takes her to see psychiatrist Terrence Bunner, who happens to have Fuller as a patient. When, at a party, Bunner lets on to Fuller that Eve—whom he won't identify—saw the killer in her vision, the mad M.D. tracks a gory path to the psychic, torturing and shooting Bunner, then a local newsman and his wife, to get Eve's name and address. Meanwhile, at Bunner's funeral, Latovsky notes Fuller's Ken-doll eyes and fingers him for the killer but can't nab him before Fuller snatches Eve, hauling her to his childhood home. There, Eve flashes on the child abuse that turned Fuller into a maniac.... A lurid, loose-jointed tale whose frantic action and emotionalism nearly obscure the familiarity (Koontz, King, etc.) of Wood's themes.
Pub Date: July 26, 1993
ISBN: 0-688-12440-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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