A brisk, evocative mystery for book-lovers who may feel bound to read it twice.
A swift, jaunty literary mystery.
Cambridge professor Bluma Lennon is flipping through a volume of Emily Dickinson poems when she’s struck by a car and killed. Her death, an accident, is proof to some that books are dangerous. The story picks up when her colleague, the narrator, takes over her teaching post and receives a tattered copy of Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow-Line that’s addressed to Bluma. The inscription indicates that she’d given the book to a man named Carlos. The tome is sufficiently valuable, and the note intriguing enough that the narrator becomes determined to unravel its mystery. When summer vacation arrives, he goes to Uruguay and tracks down one of Carlos’s bibliophile cronies, Delgado, who tells the tale of Carlos and his 20,000-plus-volume library, his infatuation with the collection and its categorization and its eventual demise. At some point, Carlos’s single-minded consumption had begun to drive him mad, and his habits had become beyond eccentric. One of his quirks was reading 17th- century works by candlelight. A spark eventually ignited one of the pages, leaving Carlos with ash and reams of waterlogged print. Devastated, he exiled himself to a fishing town to live in a cabin constructed of concrete and salvaged water-bloated books. Ultimately, the narrator is compelled to visit the hermit, but his long journey finds only an empty hovel, strewn with rare titles. The fishermen give him a few details of Carlos’s life, mentioning he’d become obsessed with finding The Shadow-Line among the ruins and that he had disappeared while doing so. With that, the mystery is closed—but also open to re-interpretations of the cleverly invoked Shadow-Line, the story of a solitary man struggling with identity and sanity.
A brisk, evocative mystery for book-lovers who may feel bound to read it twice.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-101147-8
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
A run-of-the-mill mystery that includes some welcome tips on the health benefits of chocolate.
An accountant and her lawyer husband must revisit his high school days in order to solve a murder.
Lee Woodyard is no fan of the scheme her husband, Joe, and her uncle, Hogan Jones, the local police chief, hatch to buy the Bailey house next door and flip it. But even though she’d rather be at her job as business manager at her aunt’s chocolate specialty shop (The Chocolate Bunny Brouhaha, 2016, etc.), she agrees to meet with the plumber for an estimate—a meeting that turns dangerous when plumber Digger Brown finds a bundle of rags in the cellar. When he drops them, a gun hidden in the bundle goes off, sending a bullet whizzing past Lee. No one seems to know where the old fashioned six-shooter came from, but the accident recalls a past incident in which the Sharks, a group of high school boys that included Brad Davis, Chip Brown, Sharpy Brock, Tad Bailey, and Spud Dirk, pulled a prank that could have been deadly. Years ago, when several Sharks pretended as a joke to rob a convenience store in which Brad was working, Brad pulled a real gun and fired but hit nothing more vital than the Frozen Rainbow Machine. Now Brad’s the president of the VanHorn–Davis Foundation, whose charitable donations underwrite many improvements to the Michigan lakeside town of Warner Pier. When Lee accompanies Hogan to the Bailey house to show him where the gun was, they find more than they bargained for—Spud’s corpse in a cupboard. Although Hogan’s the police chief, he must stay out of the investigation because Spud had been competing with him to buy the Bailey house. So Lee, who’d prefer to stick to chocolates, is forced to join Joe in detective work.
A run-of-the-mill mystery that includes some welcome tips on the health benefits of chocolate.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-10000-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Joe’s fifth case is his best balanced, most deeply felt and most mystifying to date: an absolute must.
Crime-fighting Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett outdoes himself during a temporary transfer from sleepy Saddlestring to fashionable Jackson Hole.
Will Jensen, the Jackson game warden, was a great guy and a model warden, but once his wife left him six months ago, he spiraled into madness and suicide, and now Joe’s been called to replace him. The transition is anything but smooth. There’s no question of Joe’s family coming with him, so he’s reduced to hoping he can get a signal for the cell-phone calls he squeezes into his busy schedule. En route to his new posting, Joe has to pursue a marauding grizzly. He arrives to meet a formidable series of challenges. Cantankerous outfitter Smoke Van Horn wants to go on attracting elk with illegal salt licks without the new warden’s interference. Animal Liberation Network activist Pi Stevenson wants him to publicize her cause and adopt a vegan diet. Developer Don Ennis wants to open a housing development for millionaires who like their meat free of additives. Ennis’s trophy wife Stella simply wants Joe—and he wants her back. As he wrestles with these demands, and with a supervisor riled over Joe’s track record of destroying government property in pursuit of bad guys (Trophy Hunt, 2004, etc.), Joe slowly becomes convinced that Will did not kill himself.
Joe’s fifth case is his best balanced, most deeply felt and most mystifying to date: an absolute must.Pub Date: May 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15291-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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