The perfect in-flight read. The only thing that’s dated is the long-distance train.
A year after reprinting Hughes’ first novel, The So Blue Marble (1940), Otto Penzler follows it with her eighth, a 1945 tale of murder feared and then executed aboard a long-distance train.
Vivien Spender is a powerful enough producer/director to do whatever he wants, and what he’s wanted for years is to find the perfect actress to play the enigmatic Clavdia Chauchat in his film adaptation of The Magic Mountain. Viv’s fancies have alighted on one candidate after another even as his devotion to Thomas Mann’s novel has remained constant. Kitten Agnew, a bona fide movie star, has convinced herself that she’s vanquished the opposition and landed the part, but Viv’s spotted a new Clavdia: Newfoundland librarian Gratia Shawn, whom he discovered while she was visiting Hollywood: “She couldn’t act but he’d teach her that.” He’s offered Kitten $1 million to buy out her contract, but she refuses to sell because she thinks the damning evidence she’s collected that Viv murdered his first wife puts her in the driver’s seat. Now, as Kitten and Gratia share a compartment aboard the Super Chief speeding from Los Angeles to New York and carrying Viv and Mike Dana, the female assistant who’s long been sweet on him, Kitten is terrified that once Viv realizes how legally indefensible his position is, he’ll have no choice but to kill her as well. As the shadows lengthen and the sense of claustrophobia thickens, Hughes examines this combustible mixture from the viewpoints of violinist-turned-bandleader Les Augustin, failed screenwriter Sidney Pringle, alcoholic reporter Hank Cavanaugh, Pullman porter James Cobbett, and the principals, each of whom scrutinizes the others as both predators and potential prey. Murder will indeed strike, but it will do little to alter the pervasive sense of dread and doom.
The perfect in-flight read. The only thing that’s dated is the long-distance train.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61316-145-6
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Penzler Publishers
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A middling mystery with telling historical details and the usual pleasures provided by the regulars’ interpersonal dynamics.
A plucky group of early-20th-century detectives (Murder on Trinity Place, 2019, etc.) takes on the Black Hand.
The leads include Frank Malloy and Gino Donatelli, former police officers who started a detective agency after an unexpected legacy made Malloy a wealthy man; Malloy’s wife, Sarah, the daughter of a wealthy society family who runs a maternity clinic for the poor; and their nanny, Maeve, a budding sleuth who works in Malloy’s office. All of them leap to attention when Gino’s sister-in-law Teodora reports that Jane Harding, a worker at the settlement house where Teo volunteers, has been kidnapped by the Black Hand, who are notorious for abducting the wives and children of anyone who can afford to pay ransom. The New York Police Department is corrupt, and the local Italian immigrants never report crimes. Mr. McWilliam, who runs the settlement house, had asked Jane to marry him, but she’d asked him to allow her to experience more of the single life before deciding. Seeking clues, Sarah visits Mrs. Cassidi, an earlier kidnapping victim who’s refused to talk to anyone, in hopes that her nursing experience and sympathetic manner will get results. Mrs. Cassidi admits to being raped but knows little about where she was held captive, a quiet place in a house where she could hear children. Soon after Nunzio Esposito, a leader of the Black Hand, tells Malloy that no one’s been taken from the settlement house, Jane suddenly reappears but refuses to discuss where she’s been. Lisa Prince, Jane’s well-to-do cousin, reluctantly agrees to take her in even though Jane’s jealous of her wealth and can be unpleasant to deal with. When Esposito’s found murdered in a flat he rented for his mistress, Gino, who’s just arrived on the scene, is arrested. Now the clever sleuths must solve both the murder and the abductions to clear Gino’s name.
A middling mystery with telling historical details and the usual pleasures provided by the regulars’ interpersonal dynamics.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0574-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
No wonder Scarpetta asks, “When did my workplace become such a soap opera?” Answer: at least 10 years ago.
Happy birthday, Dr. Kay Scarpetta. But no Florida vacation for you and your husband, FBI profiler Benton Wesley—not because President Barack Obama is visiting Cambridge, but because a deranged sniper has come to town.
Shortly after everyone’s favorite forensic pathologist (Dust, 2013, etc.) receives a sinister email from a correspondent dubbed Copperhead, she goes outside to find seven pennies—all polished, all turned heads-up, all dated 1981—on her garden wall. Clearly there’s trouble afoot, though she’s not sure what form it will take until five minutes later, when a call from her old friend and former employee Pete Marino, now a detective with the Cambridge Police, summons her to the scene of a shooting. Jamal Nari was a high school music teacher who became a minor celebrity when his name was mistakenly placed on a terrorist watch list; he claimed government persecution, and he ended up having a beer with the president. Now he’s in the news for quite a different reason. Bizarrely, the first tweets announcing his death seem to have preceded it by 45 minutes. And Leo Gantz, a student at Nari’s school, has confessed to his murder, even though he couldn’t possibly have done it. But these complications are only the prelude to a banquet of homicide past and present, as Scarpetta and Marino realize when they link Nari’s murder to a series of killings in New Jersey. For a while, the peripheral presence of the president makes you wonder if this will be the case that finally takes the primary focus off the investigator’s private life. But most of the characters are members of Scarpetta’s entourage, the main conflicts involve infighting among the regulars, and the killer turns out to be a familiar nemesis Scarpetta thought she’d left for dead several installments back. As if.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-232534-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
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