Brookhouse (Dear Otto, 1995, etc.) writes confidently and unobtrusively about authentic issues.
A quiet novel of personal and seasonal change set in a small town in New Hampshire.
Nicki Groh seems to have it all. She’s about to graduate from high school, and although she just missed being valedictorian, she’s off to Princeton in the fall. But a week before graduation she agrees to attend an evening boat party with Willie Boots, a hot-shot pitcher for the baseball team and son of a prominent businessman. Willie tries to rape Nicki, who barely escapes. She swims to shore and is rescued by Russell Blatt, a former classmate who’s about to leave for greener—or at least warmer—pastures. Nicki decides to go with him, not simply to escape the Willies of the world but also to get away from a heated but dead-end sexual relationship she was having with the high-school math teacher and the pressures of going to an Ivy League school she’s not at all sure she wants to attend. Nicki and Russell, who much to Nicki’s chagrin is gay, travel to North Carolina and find jobs waiting tables at a summer resort. Back in New Hampshire, village life begins to unravel. Nicki’s adoptive parents are at first concerned about and then resigned to her absence. Meanwhile, Willie’s father grows estranged from his wife, who in a spasm of midlife unpredictability decides she wants to become an actress. Willie gets a summer job as a security guard and finds himself entangled, both literally and metaphorically, with Joan Doyle, who casually dispenses sexual favors to local high-school boys. When Nicki comes back at the end of the novel, she’s serene, mature and pregnant.
Brookhouse (Dear Otto, 1995, etc.) writes confidently and unobtrusively about authentic issues.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-57962-179-7
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
Mystery, danger, and sexual tension abound in an action-packed thriller that breaks plenty of heads but no new ground.
Sparks fly as a woman with extraordinary abilities fights her attraction to a dangerous freelance consultant.
Dr. Kendra Michaels has worked with former FBI Agent Adam Lynch before (Double Blind, 2018), but she’s furious with him for getting her tossed out of Afghanistan after she sustained a minor wound while trying to root out corruption. Kendra, who was blind until an experimental operation restored her sight at 20, has highly developed senses of smell, hearing, and spatial awareness that she’s used to help the FBI and CIA in many difficult cases. Now, as she returns to the U.S., they have another one she can’t resist investigating. Elaine Wessler and Ronald Kim, both staff members at her old school, the Woodward Academy for the Physically Disabled in Oceanside, California, have been found murdered for no apparent reason, and FBI Special Agent Michael Griffin is anxious to use her skills and inside knowledge. Elaine had been fostering an unusual guide dog, Harley, who's had problems adjusting since the child he was working with was killed in a gas-main explosion. Now that Elaine is gone, his unearthly howls are upsetting the students. Kendra talks her best friend, Olivia, who’s blind, into sharing custody of Harley until they can find him the right home. Meanwhile, she turns up clues the FBI team missed and is rewarded for her efforts with a bomb planted in her car. It turns out to be fake, but it’s still a potent warning to walk away. Returning from Afghanistan to help Kendra, Lynch finds her still angry with him and intent on resisting his charms. Her friend Jessie Mercado, a private eye, turns up to help extricate her from a dangerous situation and sticks around to join the hunt for the killers. It will take all of them, including Harley, to solve the violent, complex case and get the school Kendra loves back on track.
Mystery, danger, and sexual tension abound in an action-packed thriller that breaks plenty of heads but no new ground.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-6292-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Fans who still mourn the passing of Agatha Christie, the model who’s evoked here in dozens of telltale details, will welcome...
A preternaturally brainy novel within a novel that’s both a pastiche and a deconstruction of golden-age whodunits.
Magpie Murders, bestselling author Alan Conway’s ninth novel about Greek/German detective Atticus Pünd, kicks off with the funeral of Mary Elizabeth Blakiston, devoted housekeeper to Sir Magnus Pye, who’s been found at the bottom of a steep staircase she’d been vacuuming in Pye Hall, whose every external door was locked from the inside. Her demise has all the signs of an accident until Sir Magnus himself follows her in death, beheaded with a sword customarily displayed with a full suit of armor in Pye Hall. Conway's editor, Susan Ryeland, does her methodical best to figure out which of many guilty secrets Conway has provided the suspects in Saxby-on-Avon—Rev. Robin Osborne and his wife, Henrietta; Mary’s son, Robert, and his fiancee, Joy Sanderling; Joy’s boss, surgeon Emilia Redwing, and her elderly father; antiques dealers Johnny and Gemma Whitehead; Magnus’ twin sister, Clarissa; and Lady Frances Pye and her inevitable lover, investor Jack Dartford—is most likely to conceal a killer, but she’s still undecided when she comes to the end of the manuscript and realizes the last chapter is missing. Since Conway in inconveniently unavailable, Susan, in the second half of the book, attempts to solve the case herself, questioning Conway’s own associates—his sister, Claire; his ex-wife, Melissa; his ex-lover, James Taylor; his neighbor, hedge fund manager John White—and slowly comes to the realization that Conway has cast virtually all of them as fictional avatars in Magpie Murders and that the novel, and indeed Conway’s entire fictional oeuvre, is filled with a mind-boggling variety of games whose solutions cast new light on murders fictional and nonfictional.
Fans who still mourn the passing of Agatha Christie, the model who’s evoked here in dozens of telltale details, will welcome this wildly inventive homage/update/commentary as the most fiendishly clever puzzle—make that two puzzles—of the year.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-264522-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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