In this thriller, an attorney investigates his father’s murder, which may have been politically motivated.
Will Muñoz, a high-priced lawyer working in San Francisco, gets the tragic news that his mother killed herself. She’d long struggled with persistent melancholy, ever since her husband, famed Chilean novelist Ricardo Muñoz, was murdered 30 years ago in what police said was a burglary gone wrong. However, in her suicide note, she expresses her long-held suspicion that Ricardo was assassinated on the orders of Chilean despot Augusto Pinochet. Ricardo was a relentless critic of Pinochet’s illiberal policies and fled Chile for the United States in 1975, after serving a prison sentence for political dissidence. Then he wrote an unpublished novel dramatizing Pinochet’s lurid personal life—a devastatingly unflattering portrayal that somehow ended up in the dictator’s hands. Will decides to conduct an investigation of his own, finds his father’s manuscript, and commissions a translation of it into English. He also discovers that his mother’s second husband, Chuck Evans, sought out the manuscript as well, had a professional connection to the CIA, and may have participated in a program that experimented on college students with mind-controlling drugs. Will continues to dig deeper and eventually stumbles upon a murderous conspiracy on American soil. Author Robinson (Tropical Judgments, 2015, etc.) conjures a complex skein of diverse plot threads; his novel is part crime drama and part political thriller, as well as a story about Will’s personal torment in dealing with a painful past. The author’s knowledge of Chilean politics in the 1970s, as well as the CIA’s nefarious interventions in it, is impressive, and he artfully weaves this history’s lingering impact into the plot. That said, the prose is a peculiar combination of awkward and banal at times, as in this description of Will’s reaction to his mother’s suicide: “I felt totally and unambiguously vacant. All the processors had shut down. Did you know that suicide is the tenth leading cause of death in the United States?”
An engaging tale, occasionally thwarted by uninspired prose.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-938288-20-3
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Terra Nova
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus run over a longtime acquaintance of hers—Barbara Baker, a woman she doesn't like very much—it's only the beginning of the shake-ups to come in her life and the lives of those she loves.
Astrid has been tootling along contentedly in the Hudson Valley town of Clapham, New York, a 68-year-old widow with three grown children. After many years of singlehood since her husband died, she's been quietly seeing Birdie Gonzalez, her hairdresser, for the past two years, and after Barbara's death she determines to tell her children about the relationship: "There was no time to waste, not in this life. There were always more school buses." Elliot, her oldest, who's in real estate, lives in Clapham with his wife, Wendy, who's Chinese American, and their twins toddlers, Aidan and Zachary, who are "such hellions that only a fool would willingly ask for more." Astrid's daughter, Porter, owns a nearby farm producing artisanal goat cheese and has just gotten pregnant through a sperm bank while having an affair with her married high school boyfriend. Nicky, the youngest Strick, is disconcertingly famous for having appeared in an era-defining movie when he was younger and now lives in Brooklyn with his French wife, Juliette, and their daughter, Cecelia, who's being shipped up to live with Astrid for a while after her friend got mixed up with a pedophile she met online. As always, Straub (Modern Lovers, 2016, etc.) draws her characters warmly, making them appealing in their self-centeredness and generosity, their insecurity and hope. The cast is realistically diverse, though in most ways it's fairly superficial; the fact that Birdie is Latina or Porter's obstetrician is African American doesn't have much impact on the story or their characters. Cecelia's new friend, August, wants to make the transition to Robin; that storyline gets more attention, with the two middle schoolers supporting each other through challenging times. The Stricks worry about work, money, sex, and gossip; Straub has a sharp eye for her characters' foibles and the details of their liberal, upper-middle-class milieu.
Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59463-469-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Categories: FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | LITERARY FICTION
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In Kidd’s (The Invention of Wings, 2014, etc.) feminist take on the New Testament, Jesus has a wife whose fondest longing is to write.
Ana is the daughter of Matthias, head scribe to Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee. She demonstrates an exceptional aptitude for writing, and Matthias, for a time, indulges her with reed pens, papyri, and other 16 C.E. office supplies. Her mother disapproves, but her aunt, Yaltha, mentors Ana in the ways of the enlightened women of Alexandria, from whence Yaltha, suspected of murdering her brutal husband, was exiled years before. Yaltha was also forced to give up her daughter, Chaya, for adoption. As Ana reaches puberty, parental tolerance of her nonconformity wanes, outweighed by the imperative to marry her off. Her adopted brother, Judas—yes, that Judas—is soon disowned for his nonconformity—plotting against Antipas. On the very day Ana, age 14, meets her prospective betrothed, the repellent Nathanial, in the town market, she also encounters Jesus, a young tradesman, to whom she’s instantly drawn. Their connection deepens after she encounters Jesus in the cave where she is concealing her writings about oppressed women. When Nathanial dies after his betrothal to Ana but before their marriage, Ana is shunned for insufficiently mourning him—and after refusing to become Antipas’ concubine, she is about to be stoned until Jesus defuses the situation with that famous admonition. She marries Jesus and moves into his widowed mother’s humble compound in Nazareth, accompanied by Yaltha. There, poverty, not sexism, prohibits her from continuing her writing—office supplies are expensive. Kidd skirts the issue of miracles, portraying Jesus as a fully human and, for the period, accepting husband—after a stillbirth, he condones Ana’s practice of herbal birth control. A structural problem is posed when Jesus’ active ministry begins—what will Ana’s role be? Problem avoided when, notified by Judas that Antipas is seeking her arrest, she and Yaltha journey to Alexandria in search of Chaya. In addition to depriving her of the opportunity to write the first and only contemporaneous gospel, removing Ana from the main action destroys the novel’s momentum.
A daring concept not so daringly developed.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-42976-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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