An enjoyably off-kilter whodunit with an ethically compromised amateur detective.
In Meisler’s debut mystery, a California real estate agent investigates a poisoning after police eye him as a potential murderer.
Rick Davies’ latest real estate venture is a run-down home located in desirable Mill Valley, which he figures he can sell for nearly $1 million. Octavia Papadopoulos’ late sister, Sylvia, used to live there, and Octavia asks him to look through the attic to verify that it contains nothing valuable. He finds a few notable things that he keeps for himself, including several thousand dollars in cash and a vial of unidentified white powder. Not long afterward, police detectives ask Rick about a dead woman he doesn’t know, but who had his business card. The same detectives later arrest him on unspecified charges at the Mill Valley open house, but oddly, they don’t interrogate him. Following his release on bail, Rick learns that his newly deceased contractor, Barney, may have been poisoned with tainted cocaine—likely from the aforementioned vial, which Rick gave him. To ensure that cops don’t pin a murder on him, Rick searches for a killer, and Kirsten, a real estate agent he recently met, helps him, primarily out of boredom. They begin by talking to Octavia, then stumble upon a suspect or two, as well as other possible murders. Meisler’s unconventional mystery is brisk and generally funny. It’s set in 2008, and there are numerous jokes about then-current technology; in one scene, for instance, Rick watches Kirsten use a finger rather than a stylus on her new iPhone, which he says is “like looking into the future.” As a protagonist, Rick has some unsavory qualities; he drinks excessively, uses his dead father’s prescription morphine, and concentrates too much on Kirsten’s physical traits. Nevertheless, his first-person narration has a certain level of charm; at one point, for example, when he’s wary of someone’s motives, he recalls “that Stephen King movie with Kathy Bates.” The mystery itself isn’t fully satisfying, as Rick generates theories based mostly on speculation, leading to a somewhat convoluted final act. However, the darkly humorous ending does answer some lingering questions.
An enjoyably off-kilter whodunit with an ethically compromised amateur detective.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9961570-9-4
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Sensitive Skin Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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