Though it’s not a fully successful novel, this fascinating melodrama of sexual and racial confusion, conflict, and injustice is both a bold departure from and a logical outgrowth of the brooding studies of gay angst (Martin and John, 1993; The Law of Enclosures, 1996) that established Peck as one of our most interesting younger writers. Thematic and other echoes of the earlier books resound throughout this big novel, which relates through a large chorus of townspeople’s voices the explosive occurrences after writer Colin Nieman and his lover “Justin Time” flee AIDS-polluted New York for a rural Kansas town that’s effectively divided into white and black subsections, Galatea and Galatia. The pair’s interrelations with numerous bruised and guilty souls—a black hustler named Divine, a woman “archivist” obsessed with unearthing her town’s secrets, and a wealthy matriarch who may have ordered a murder are prominent among them—reveal a dauntingly intricate heritage of violence: the lynching of a black teenager falsely accused of “touching” a young girl, the real crime that underlay the town’s mania for “justice.” The ambiguities in both of the novels Colin has written (and will write) and of the very one we’re reading are—a bit affectedly—linked to that mystery. More persuasively, the infectious momentum here powerfully dramatizes what its characters call “humanity’s need to reveal itself through written confession” and the truth that “most people have only one secret, and that secret is whom they truly love.” Peck incorporates his story’s grand mal particulars into a surprisingly tightly plotted narrative, weakened but not quite sunk by its penchant for excess (the resolution of that lynching victim’s story is both overwrought and opaque). And to its benefit and detriment (in almost equal measure), this very literary fiction is derivative, to varying degrees, of James Purdy, James Leo Herlihy, Erskine Caldwell, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, an
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-22271-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
The romantic doings of the likable characters are more interesting than the mediocre mystery.
A bike shop owner and her book club pals keep solving mysteries in ways that somehow don’t endear them to the police (Murder on Cape Cod, 2018, etc.).
Mackenzie Almeida, the proprietor of Mac’s Bikes in the touristy Cape Cod town of Westham, is dating Tim Brunelle, the caring and handsome owner of an artisanal bakery, who wants to get married and start a family. That’s not something independent neat freak Mac is ready to do. She enjoys living in her tiny house with Belle, her talkative parrot, for company. When Mac and her best friend, Gin, come across the dead body of wealthy Beverly Ruchart outside Gin’s taffy shop, Mac’s romantic problems get put on the back burner, especially since Gin is a suspect. She and her date, Eli Tubin, the widower of Beverly’s daughter, had attended a party at Beverly’s home only the night before. Beverly seems to have died from a heart attack, but an autopsy finds that she was poisoned with antifreeze, some of which has been planted in Gin’s garage. Of course Mac and her cohorts at the book club can’t resist a little sleuthing. They uncover several other plausible suspects: Beverly’s ne’er-do-well grandson, Ron, his Russian girlfriend, and his long-absent father, who has a police record. Although Beverly could be generous, she had a sharp tongue that made her plenty of enemies. Her interest in genealogy and reuniting long-lost parents and children endeared her to Wesley Farnham, for whom she found a son, but not so much to Farnham’s daughter, who misses being an only child. Although Mac turns her findings over to the police, she still attracts the killer’s notice and ends up owing her life to Belle.
The romantic doings of the likable characters are more interesting than the mediocre mystery.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1508-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Shalvis’ latest retains her spark and sizzle.
Piper Manning is determined to sell her family’s property so she can leave her hometown behind, but when her siblings come back with life-changing secrets and her sexy neighbor begins to feel like “The One,” she might have to redo her to-do list.
As children, Piper and her younger siblings, Gavin and Winnie, were sent to live with their grandparents in Wildstone, California, from the Congo after one of Gavin’s friends was killed. Their parents were supposed to meet them later but never made it. Piper wound up being more of a parent than her grandparents, though: “In the end, Piper had done all the raising. It’d taken forever, but now, finally, her brother and sister were off living their own lives.” Piper, the queen of the bullet journal, plans to fix up the family’s lakeside property her grandparents left the three siblings when they died. Selling it will enable her to study to be a physician’s assistant as she’s always wanted. However, just as the goal seems in sight, Gavin and Winnie come home, ostensibly for Piper’s 30th birthday, and then never leave. Turns out, Piper’s brother and sister have recently managed to get into a couple buckets of trouble, and they need some time to reevaluate their options. They aren’t willing to share their problems with Piper, though they’ve been completely open with each other. And Winnie, who’s pregnant, has been very open with Piper’s neighbor Emmitt Reid and his visiting son, Camden, since the baby’s father is Cam’s younger brother, Rowan, who died a few months earlier in a car accident. Everyone has issues to navigate, made more complicated by Gavin and Winnie’s swearing Cam to secrecy just as he and Piper try—and fail—to ignore their attraction to each other. Shalvis keeps the physical and emotional tension high, though the siblings’ refusal to share with Piper becomes tedious and starts to feel childish.
Shalvis’ latest retains her spark and sizzle.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296139-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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