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
Koontz widens his canvas dramatically while dimming the hard brilliance common to his shorter winners:1995’s taut masterpiece, Intensity, and 1998’s moon-drenched midsummer nightmare, Seize the Night. This time the author takes up mind control, wiring his tale into the brainwashing epics The Manchurian Candidate and last spring’s film The Matrix. The laser-beam brightness of his earlier bestsellers fades, however, as he stuffs each scene with draining chitchat and extra plotting that seldom rings with novelty. Martine “Martie” Rhodes, a video-game designer, has developed a rare mental disorder: autophobia, fear of oneself. Meanwhile, her husband Dusty’s young half-brother, Skeet Caulfield, has decided to jump off the roof of a building the two men are repairing—because Skeet has seen the Angel of the next world, who has revealed that things are pretty wonderful there, and he wants to come on over. Martie’s best friend, real-estate agent Susan Jagger, is newly coping with agoraphobia, fear of the outdoors. What’s more, Susan knows she’s being visited and raped at night by her separated husband, Eric, although all her doors and windows are locked. She can’t remember these rapes, but her panties are stained with semen. So when she sets up a camcorder to record her sleeping hours, she gets a huge surprise after viewing the tape. How these mental and physical events have come about—ditto the psychiatric background of the Keanuphobe millionairess who shows up (yes! she fears Keanu Reeves)—has something to do with the ladies’ psychiatrist, Dr. Mark Ahriman, the son of a famous dead movie director whose eyes the doctor keeps in a bottle of formaldehyde and studies, in hopes of siphoning off Dad’s inspiration. Although the whole story could have been told to better effect in 300 pages, Koontz deftly sidesteps clichÇs of expression while nonetheless applying an air pump to the suspense: an MO that keeps his yearly 17-million book sales afloat.
Pub Date: Dec. 28, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10666-X
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Utter non-scents.
Die-hard Yankee candle maker Stella Wright (Murder’s No Votive Confidence, 2018) gets caught up in a trans-Atlantic murder plot.
Stella thoroughly enjoys her trip to Paris even though her mother, perfume expert Millie Wright, who’s scheduled to speak on a panel entitled “The Art of Scent Extractions” at the World Perfumery Conference, gets preempted by a murder. Sadly, once they’re back home in Nantucket, things get even weirder. Stella receives an anonymous note threatening her mom if Stella doesn’t turn over a secret formula hidden in Millie’s bag. Her mom can’t help because she’s in the hospital courtesy of an overenthusiastic attempt by Stella’s cat, Tinker, to befriend her. While trespassing on a suspicious sailboat, Stella meets U.S. Agent Sarah Hill, who warns her that well-known anarchist Rex Laruam plans to disrupt the upcoming Peace Jubilee using a stolen formula he secreted in Millie’s bag after he stabbed the agent guarding it back in Paris. Ignoring the advice of her friend Andy Southerland, a Nantucket cop, to leave detection to the professionals, Stella tries to unmask the elusive Laruam. As she spies on a bevy of unlikely suspects, the plot spirals further and further out of control: There’s a Canadian couple staying at an Airbnb run by Stella’s cousin Chris who whisper sweet but suspicious nothings in the dark, a shovel-wielding schoolmarm, a gang of old geezers who have a collective crush on Millie, a surprise 30th-birthday party planned by Stella’s beau, Peter Bailey, and an even more surprising impromptu airplane ride.
Utter non-scents.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2141-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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