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 best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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