A winning protagonist and authentic sense of place make this a mystery worth puzzling over.
An amateur sleuth comes to the rescue in this suspenseful backwoods drug caper.
Wealand’s unpretentious debut mystery novel reveals its disarming, straight-shooting charm from the first sentence: “Dr. Garnet Daniels hurried toward the women’s restroom desperately squeezing her anal sphincter and hoping she wouldn't meet anyone on the way.” Garnet, who struggles with irritable bowel syndrome, is something of an anomaly as a successful, well-respected doctor in her small Arkansas community who teaches Gross Anatomy at the local medical school. With her husband away on a long trip overseas during her first summer vacation in years, she looks forward to getting some much-needed relaxation. However, her niece, Colleen, who’s living with her for the season, gets involved with a morally dubious college football star and then implicated in a drug investigation. Garnet puts her intelligence and occasionally far-fetched intuition to good use; at one point, for example, she tracks down the snake whose titular bite has landed the football star in the hospital—and whose stomach contains a key piece of evidence. Some suspension of disbelief is also necessary to swallow the idea that local law enforcement would readily accept Garnet’s somewhat intrusive help. For the book’s middle stretch, Garnet and Colleen are joined by Colleen’s mother, Rae; her business partner, Maezelle; and Garnet’s other sister, Valentine. Wealand’s large cast of characters can feel excessively crowded; later, her focus zooms out to introduce even more new characters as the scope of the investigation expands. Also, the book suffers slightly from its characterization of marijuana as a gateway drug. However, Wealand’s prose is readable, often funny and always clear, and she vividly and intimately conjures her rural setting (“The muted roar of the outboards lulled the passengers who began to relax and enjoy the sparkling current and graveled banks of the winding river”). Mystery fans will surely enjoy this romp and look forward to the series’ next installment.
A winning protagonist and authentic sense of place make this a mystery worth puzzling over.Pub Date: June 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692212851
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Pairodocs
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2014
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 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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