Anyone interested in a good mystery along with insights into marine life will enjoy D’Avanzo’s latest.
Mystery writer D’Avanzo (Demon Spirit, Devil Sea, 2017, etc.) is back on the coast of Maine, dealing with a bunch of lobstermen who want no truck with nosy outsiders.
In the very first chapter, marine biologist and amateur sleuth Mara Tusconi discovers a body under her cousin Gordy Maloy’s mussel aquaculture raft, a body that had belonged to lobsterman Buddy Crawford. Whodunit? Mara soon finds herself on Macomeck Island, a speck in the Gulf of Maine about 25 miles off the coast. Lobstermen have lived on the island for generations, and something akin to the law of the frontier holds sway. Mara, who is fighting her own demons of loneliness and insecurity, finds comfort in grandmotherly Abby Burgess. Abby’s daughter Patty, Gordy’s girlfriend, is sure that the killer is hotheaded Tyler Johnson, reputed druggie. But Mara keeps sniffing around and uncovering old wounds, grudges, and hatreds. There are also very vivid scenes such as a near catastrophe when a sudden squall threatens to swamp Mara’s sea kayak. Pushing on, she begins to recover from her own wounds (some self-inflicted), and the final episode in a submersible with her old flame, Ted McNight, may just put her life back on course. It should also be mentioned that her best confidant is a lobster named Homer, (who of course is very discreet). D’Avanzo writes well (“The knots in my stomach would have made a sailor proud”) and delivers a nice mix of Mara’s outer challenges (who killed Buddy?) and inner (will she ever find love?). She also delivers a lot of very interesting facts about oceanography and marine biology, having earned a Ph.D. from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. That alone is worth the read. She switches to dialect when she deems it appropriate (“lobstah,” “habah,” “remembah”). Some readers may find this charming; others may find it a bit tiresome and distracting. This installment contains a preview of her next Mara Tusconi mystery, Glass Eels, Shattered Sea (2019).
Anyone interested in a good mystery along with insights into marine life will enjoy D’Avanzo’s latest.Pub Date: June 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63381-136-2
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Maine Authors Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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