Smith’s slyly entertaining satire makes it easy to overlook the perfunctory, forgettable mystery.
Another Hollywood production ventures into the sticks, with results that are predictably droll, dry and homicidal.
Now that she’s cut director Peter Dunmore out of Frontier Woman, “the Eat, Pray, Love of the nineteenth century,” just as it’s about to begin shooting in Woodstock, N.Y., scheming producer Sam Sawchuk is ready to install her husband and producing partner, gutless rookie Robb Fetterman, in his place. Little does Sam know she’s about to be outmaneuvered by two new colleagues even sharper than she is. When she approaches suspiciously red-haired Indian casino owner Ronnie Red Hawk for the last $6 million she needs to shoot the picture, he responds by writing a check and then grabbing the reins from Sam’s Big Deal Productions. Virgil Cain, the Woodstock farmer last seen under arrest for murder in Red Means Run (2012), demonstrates a quieter, funnier mode of resistance once he and a pair of Percherons he’s nursing back to health are hired for some background shots. Virgil befriends all the wrong people, from veteran second-unit director Tommy Alamosa to 10-year-old actress Georgia Lee Thompson, and gets under the skin of self-important types like Robb and producer Levi Brown. The death of leading lady Olivia Burns, well-liked but scarcely mourned by the hard-bitten crew of Frontier Woman, sets the stage for Ronnie to replace her with starlet Kari Karson, who’s better known for her tabloid exploits than her acting chops. There’ll be more violent deaths, but the criminal byplay is less engaging than the puncturing of the Hollywood blowhards by the country bumpkins who run rings around them.
Smith’s slyly entertaining satire makes it easy to overlook the perfunctory, forgettable mystery.Pub Date: July 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9756-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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
Agreeably credible lovers and a neat piece of home-restoration compensate some for the hokey hauntings on the bayou. Loyal...
A gumbo seasoned with ghosts, love, and murder on the bayou.
When 30-something Declan Fitzgerald of Boston, a successful lawyer and a member of a large and loving family, breaks off his engagement to very suitable Jessica, he knows he needs to change his life. Lawyering is not fun anymore, so, recalling Manet Hall, an old deserted plantation house he once visited with law school classmate and New Orleans native Remy, he buys the property and moves down south. Declan is also a gifted craftsman, a born decorator, and very, very rich. Soon, he meets beautiful Lena, who’s visiting her grandmother Odette, Declan’s friendly Cajun neighbor. Declan is as certain that Lena is destined to be his wife as he was that Manet Hall would become his home. But, surprise, Lena has a troubled past (like the house) and is determined to resist Declan’s courtship. While he suits Lena and works on the place, Declan experiences troubling dreams. It seems he’s actually reliving the novel’s parallel story, which took place in 1899. In that year, the maid, Abbey Manet (from whom Lena, coincidentally, is descended, and who married wealthy Lucian Manet), was raped and murdered by her brother-in-law Julian as she nursed her baby daughter. Her body was dumped into the bayou by her mother-in-law, who despised her. And grief-stricken husband Lucian, away at the time, being told that Abbey had run off, committed suicide. Now, in an unconvincing twist of gender and reincarnation, it’s Declan who hears a baby crying , experiences childbirth and rape as the reincarnation of Abbey, while Lena is Lucian. The two accept all this with equanimity, and, Manet Hall’s secrets revealed, it becomes the setting for predictable and much foreshadowed resolutions.
Agreeably credible lovers and a neat piece of home-restoration compensate some for the hokey hauntings on the bayou. Loyal fans will enjoy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14824-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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