An inventive and humorous but overly chaotic read.
A hapless detective clashes with violent drug dealers and renegade dentists in DeMicoli’s raucous adventure set in a town outside Oakland, California.
Down-on-his-luck private eye Hugo Picoli arrives at his storefront office to find a potential client waiting for him: Farrah Mason, who says that her husband, Jolly, a prominent dentist, has disappeared. Recently, Jolly’s mother, Lady Mason, drove her Rolls-Royce into a pole after being frightened by the antics of skateboarding teenager Mill Moffett. According to Farrah, the last time anyone saw Jolly “was when he dragged that Mill kid outta his trailer, stuffed him in the trunk, and sped off to who-knows-where.” Farrah hands Hugo $10,000 in cash and asks him to track her spouse down, suggesting that he look for clues at the Crowns Social Club, a hangout for the upscale dentist crowd. Before Hugo sets off on his new assignment, DeMicoli pauses to fill in details about the PI’s less-than-illustrious two-year career with the Soma Arbor Spring police department. Later, at the clubhouse, Hugo has some preliminary misadventures which result in him receiving gold veneers, and he’s offered a few magic mushrooms—giving the author the opportunity to take readers on a frenzied psychedelic ride. Like other episodes in the novel, it’s creative and colorful but challenging to follow. The main plotline revolves around a grudge involving the head of the nation’s largest dental floss manufacturer, but readers will quickly discover that the author indulges in digressions far too frequently. He also fills his cast with an assortment of misanthropic, garishly clothed characters with quirky names (including Veggie Dave, Chicky Smitt, and Gator Booth) that require a scorecard to keep straight. Still, tech-oriented readers are likely to enjoy the collection of imaginative devices that Picoli and his cop colleague Kirby Pocket design, such as an inflatable protective bubble that whisks someone out of a dangerous situation.
An inventive and humorous but overly chaotic read.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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