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Cassowary Hill

Name: Cassowary Hill
Author: David de Vaux

A NOVEL

by David de Vaux ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 20, 2015

Multilayered expat saga best as a showcase of its exotic setting.

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In this debut novel, a British expatriate’s ghostwriting gig leads to a political showdown involving his retired spook neighbor in Queensland.

Tom Pryce-Bowyer, 52, returns from his travels to find Alfred, resident cassowary, on his cabin doorstep in the Queensland rainforest. Fortunately, the nearly 5-foot-2-inch bird is a “gentle giant”; indeed, Tom’s few human neighbors are more problematic, particularly Jack Tryvet, a 60-something and former military intelligence agent who, like Tom, is a British expatriate. Tom discovered that Jack had a long-running affair with Tom’s Canadian doctor wife, Paulette, which led to Tom’s recent divorce. Tom went to the United States because Emmi Jay—a then-married American he met when he and Paulette did volunteer work in Fiji as part of “a hippy diaspora” of the 1970s—proposed Tom as a ghostwriter for a book by Bia Moraes, a celebrated photographer. Tom gets into a long-distance relationship with Emjay and works on Bia’s book. Bia visits Australia, and she and her friends enlist Jack’s help to expose a villainousU.S. general who disobeyed orders during atrocities in late-1990s East Timor, which included the murder of Bia’s lover. The general meets with Jack in Queensland, bringing deadly tumult to Tom’s refuge, although by novel’s end, new hope arises for the aging writer. Debut author de Vaux drops Graham Greene’s name several times and also has Jack describe himself as “the very double of Flashman Paget.” Although there are echoes of Greene in de Vaux’s descriptive tour of exotic locales and the moral quagmires faced by his expatriate characters, Jack isn’t quite convincing as a dashing character. Likewise, the tensions between him and first-person narrator Tom are rather glossed over as Paulette disappears from the book. Tom’s new romance is also somewhat tepid, especially juxtaposed with East Timor–related events. Still, the final sequence with the general is quite riveting, the suspense and danger heightened by Queensland’s strange, wondrous natural habitat.

Multilayered expat saga best as a showcase of its exotic setting.

Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 259

Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2015

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES

by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

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Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.

Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

Categories:

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Hulu’s ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’ Adds To Cast

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.