An enjoyable and well-paced mystery with a surprise kicker.
An ex-photojournalist and owner of the Joyeux Winery on the central California coast finds herself at the scene of another murder—but this time her cousin turns out to be the prime suspect.
O’Neil’s (Ripe for Murder, 2016, etc.) third Cypress Cove Mystery is a delightful addition to the series. Amateur criminal investigator Penny Lively just can’t stay out of trouble—and danger. Bodies seem to turn up whenever she’s around, much to the consternation of the local sheriff, who warns her to stay out of his cases. But what is Penny to do when veterinarian Brian Grasser is found stabbed in the back on the floor of the clinic he shares with Penny’s cousin Annie Moore and Annie is holding the knife? Fortunately, there are plenty of other suspects for Penny to pursue, although that number drops when one of them is also killed. There’s the aging hippie Dot, who was working in the back office at the time of the vet’s murder; tech Nicole, whom Brian caught stealing pills from the dispensary; Dr. Eric Sloan, the about-to-be-millionaire researcher; and Jason, head of Amerigen, the pharmaceutical company investing in Eric’s new rabies vaccine. Even Brian’s wife, Claire, has something to hide. Penny is an engaging narrator—a pushy and pleasantly sarcastic observer who zooms in on details. The only time she is tongue-tied is when her handsome winery manager, Connor, is around. O’Neil’s prose is breezy and fluent. Dialogue is natural, filled with banter, and not cluttered with constant he said, she said fillers. She is also linguistically comfortable with the tale’s California backdrop, delivering evocative imagery: “The fog was creeping in from the sea, an almost nightly occurrence this close to the ocean. It danced along the ground and curled around the car. There’s a silence that accompanies this ritual.” Plus, there are bonus tidbits about the winery business: “Years ago, wineries were for one thing: making wine. Now, hosting functions was one of the more reliable ways wineries made money.” Appropriate to the story’s veterinary theme, Joyeux hosts the “Fabulously Ugly Dog Contest."
An enjoyable and well-paced mystery with a surprise kicker.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9992703-0-1
Page Count: 300
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
