A touch overwrought, a touch didactic, but haunting nonetheless.
Cerebral mystery from classy bestseller Goodman (The Seduction of Water, 2003, etc.).
A magnificent stained-glass window at Penrose College (“a bastion of East Coast wealth and privilege”) holds hidden clues, and alumna Christine Webb, an art history lecturer now in her mid-40s, calls attention to each one as she stands in front of it. Though beautiful blond Christine bears an uncanny resemblance to the translucent, shimmering female figure the window portrays, the model was the wife of Augustus Penrose, a turn-of-the-century glassmaker, artist, and founder of the college. Christine explains the allegorical significance of the complex image at great length (and in excessive detail), tracing its connection to Romantic poetry, pre-Raphaelite painting, Greek myth, nascent feminism, and so on as the well-heeled women in the audience listen intently. Then her best friend from college, Juno McKay, is shocked to see Christine suddenly bathed in a blood-red glow, owing to a trick of the light. A college legend says that this presages death, and soon enough Christine disappears. When she’s found drowned alongside an overturned kayak, the question becomes: Did she commit suicide (with the help of a drug overdose perhaps) or was she murdered? Juno begins to follow the twisting threads of Penrose family history until a pattern emerges. It seems that Augustus married Eugenie, the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer who bought the Penrose glass company, but he truly loved her younger sister Clare, whose fragile sanity then cracked, culminating in an attempt at suicide by drowning. The discovery of Clare’s subsequent mental breakdown leads Juno to a century-old institution for the insane near the Hudson River, where still more secrets are revealed, as well as the present-day villains of the piece. But it is the long-dead sisters, entwined forever by love and hate, who fascinate.
A touch overwrought, a touch didactic, but haunting nonetheless.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46211-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The plot is absurd, of course, but the book is a definitive pleasure. Prepare to be absorbed—and in more ways than one.
Another Brown (Inferno, 2013, etc.) blockbuster, blending arcana, religion, and skulduggery—sound familiar?—with the latest headlines.
You just have to know that when the first character you meet in a Brown novel is a debonair tech mogul and the second a bony-fingered old bishop, you’ll end up with a clash of ideologies and worldviews. So it is. Edmond Kirsch, once a student of longtime Brown hero Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist–turned–action hero, has assembled a massive crowd, virtual and real, in Bilbao to announce he’s discovered something that’s destined to kill off religion and replace it with science. It would be ungallant to reveal just what the discovery is, but suffice it to say that the religious leaders of the world are in a tizzy about it, whereupon one shadowy Knights of Malta type takes it upon himself to put a bloody end to Kirsch’s nascent heresy. Ah, but what if Kirsch had concocted an AI agent so powerful that his own death was just an inconvenience? What if it was time for not just schism, but singularity? Digging into the mystery, Langdon finds a couple of new pals, one of them that computer avatar, and a whole pack of new enemies, who, not content just to keep Kirsch’s discovery under wraps, also frown on the thought that a great many people in the modern world, including some extremely prominent Spaniards, find fascism and Falangism passé and think the reigning liberal pope is a pretty good guy. Yes, Franco is still dead, as are Christopher Hitchens, Julian Jaynes, Jacques Derrida, William Blake, and other cultural figures Brown enlists along the way—and that’s just the beginning of the body count. The old ham-fisted Brown is here in full glory (“In that instant, Langdon realized that perhaps there was a macabre silver lining to Edmond’s horrific murder”; “The vivacious, strong-minded beauty had turned Julián’s world upside down”)—but, for all his defects as a stylist, it can’t be denied that he knows how to spin a yarn, and most satisfyingly.
The plot is absurd, of course, but the book is a definitive pleasure. Prepare to be absorbed—and in more ways than one.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-51423-1
Page Count: 461
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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