An entertaining and well-crafted addition to a dog-centric mystery series.
Newsome (Sneak Thief, 2015, etc.) returns to the adventures of artist and canine lover Lia Anderson.
In this fifth Dog Park Mystery, Lia, the committed owner of two pooches—a miniature schnauzer and a golden retriever—is finally dating Detective Peter Dourson. She met Peter when he investigated the death of her boyfriend at the beginning of the series. But Lia and Peter haven’t had enough time to enjoy each other’s company because she has been commissioned to build a float for the Northside’s famous Fourth of July Parade. Shaped like “a giant Browning Buckmark .22 pistol,” the float means to celebrate the work of local Cincinnati crime novelist Lucas Cross, even though he vanished while attending an authors’ convention in Austin, Texas, at the beginning of June. It’s a strange situation, but, as Lia notes, even if Cross is still missing by the time of the parade, the gun “will only be in slightly worse taste than the usual Northside parade float. [Cross’] books are coming out next month, regardless.” When the accountant of the Cross-affiliated knitting club that commissioned the float is inexplicably attacked one night in an alley, the sense of foul play begins to grow. Lia must put down her artist’s cap and return to her role as amateur investigator in hopes of discovering the truth behind Cross’ disappearance before anyone gets killed. Newsome writes with flair and humor, balancing the tension of the novel’s mystery against the lighthearted backdrop of the Mount Air dog park. The charmingly idiosyncratic characters—human and animal both—set the book apart from more noirish works, and the slight goofiness (parade floats, knitting circles) puts the reader pleasantly off balance. The stakes are never so high that the reader feels anxious, but the author delivers an inventive plot and a sharp and compelling protagonist. Dog-obsessed readers in particular should enjoy this riff on the whodunit genre that keeps its canines central to the action in a way pet owners likely feel is lacking in other works of fiction.
An entertaining and well-crafted addition to a dog-centric mystery series.Pub Date: April 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9963742-4-8
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Two Pup Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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