Arch concept humor, deliberately paced yet weirdly discordant—exactly the sort of thing that will appeal to readers who like...
A secret-hoarding caterer is frozen to death inside a wealthy client’s walk-in freezer: an English-translation debut that sounds like, but emphatically isn’t, a case for Hercule Poirot.
Nor for any other fictional detective either, since children’s author Posadas begins her story with its ending: The night peerless pastry cook Nestor Chaffino’s natural buoyancy turns to peevishness and finally terror when he finds himself locked inside the cold room at the Lilies, Ernesto Teldi’s house on the Costa del Sol. Instead of unleashing a sleuth, Posadas charts the gravely wacky incidents that led up to Nestor’s final frozen dessert and the secrets he collected along with his prized recipes. Which of them led to his murder? Was it something he knew about the checkered career of Ernesto Teldi before he settled into the safe groove of an art dealer? Or about the suicide years ago of Adela Teldi’s sister Soledad during an intimate visit to her sister and her brother-in-law? Or about the motorcycle death years before that of Eddie Trias, whose grieving sister Chloe survived to become Nestor’s unpaid kitchen hand and his waiter Carlos Garcia’s lover? Or about the incorrigible fondness Ernesto’s friend, the magistrate Serafin Tous, has for beautiful young men? Or about the clairvoyant Madame Longstaffe’s advice to Carlos about how to find his love and her prediction that Nestor didn’t have to worry about the lung cancer he was convinced would kill him? It all sounds very mysterious, but Posadas is writing a pastiche rather than a whodunit, beginning with the twist that the “little indiscretions” Nestor prizes so highly really are cooking secrets rather than his friends’ dirty laundry.
Arch concept humor, deliberately paced yet weirdly discordant—exactly the sort of thing that will appeal to readers who like that sort of thing, as half a million readers in 12 languages reportedly have so far.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50885-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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