An engaging mystery with a late twist and an especially satisfying ending.
In this fifth installment of a series, a journalist and incorrigible amateur sleuth investigates a murder that disrupts a celebration at a peaceful cultural retreat in New York State.
It is the Fourth of July, and the Chautauqua Institution’s 5,000-seat Amphitheater is filled for the annual Independence Day concert. As the orchestra reaches the crescendo of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture,” the audience pops paper bags on cue from the conductor. Lost in the cacophony is the sound of gunfire. Nobody hears it. Then Mimi Goldman, the sports editor of the Chautauquan Daily, sees EMTs racing to take out a woman on a stretcher. A 36-year-old documentary filmmaker, Maureen Donahue, has been killed. Mimi, who hails from New York City and logged several decades as a reporter and copy editor for the New York Post, plunges headfirst into the investigation. Never mind that she is about to marry her upstate beau, Walt Dellaria, and her schedule is already more than full. Who would have reason to kill Maureen? This, it turns out, is the wrong question, and it sends Mimi off on a tangent. No matter. There are plenty of little backstories to keep things gossipy and intriguing. When the prime suspect, Craig Halladay, a mentally disturbed man from New York City, turns himself in so he can proclaim his innocence, Mimi becomes suspicious that the case is being closed too quickly. Pines (Beside Still Waters, 2017, etc.), a newspaper copy editor and former reporter, produces snappy prose, and her narrative moves along at a healthy speed. On the way, readers are introduced to an assortment of eclectic secondary characters who make up the quirky ensemble of townies and visitors to the Chautauqua Institution, a well-known “summer camp for adults.” As in her previous volumes, the author takes the time to lay out the geography, history, and rich intellectual and artistic tapestry of the gated enclave, which first opened in the late 19th century. She builds her large cast of players with similar care, giving each one a chapter or two in which to star.
An engaging mystery with a late twist and an especially satisfying ending.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72317-982-2
Page Count: 262
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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