A solid tale of murder, suspense, and political intrigue.
A debut mystery revolves around a teacher’s knowledge of a killing, and the crime’s political implications during the Watergate era.
Laura Parker is a fifth-grade teacher excited to celebrate the last day of school with a trip to Manhattan to see a Broadway show with her husband. He selfishly cancels their plans in favor of a night out with his co-workers, and Laura angrily decides to have an evening out without him. While walking downtown, she’s mistaken for a prostitute by a high-end pimp, and offered $150 to turn a trick at the luxurious Plaza Hotel. Amazingly, she accepts the offer, and has sex with a high-powered attorney, Paul Bradley. The next day Bradley is discovered dead in his hotel room, apparently strangled. Laura quickly covers her tracks, getting a new hairdo to alter her appearance and replacing the ankle bracelet she lost during the encounter, one with her husband’s pet name for her, Kat, engraved on it. Her predicament becomes even more complicated, though, when the police suspect Bradley was murdered by a man who had an illicit affair with the lawyer’s wife. Laura’s conscience is tortured because she saw the men responsible for the crime, but is afraid to come forward and reveal her indiscretion. In addition, it turns out that Bradley was a political insider with a connection to the Republican National Committee, and that there is the possibility that his death is the consequence of nefarious political subterfuge. Saltman skillfully braids the political and the personal, connecting Laura’s marital discontent with the brewing Watergate controversy. And the plot is just complicated enough to keep the reader guessing, but not so diffuse that it’s laborious to follow. One conspicuous difficulty with the plot is that it’s entirely borne out of Laura’s inexplicable decision to consent to prostitution; even given the woeful state of her marriage, it seems jarringly incongruent with her character. And while the prose is unerringly clear, it can be a touch schmaltzy: the pimp who strangely mistakes Laura for a hooker—what was she wearing?—calls himself “Mr. Hanky Panky.” Still, this makes for fun, recreational reading—light on literary substance, but still intelligently crafted and exciting.
A solid tale of murder, suspense, and political intrigue.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9906755-0-1
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Still River Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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