Australian poet/YA author Porter's first adult novel has a twist you won't soon forget: It unfolds entirely in poetry, from the moment lesbian Sydney p.i. Jill Fitzpatrick is hired to find missing university student Mickey Norris to the moment Jill realizes how Mickey died. Put off by the idea of crime in verse? Don't be. This doesn't require the heavy investment of The Ring and the Book: The castrevolving mostly around Mickey's seductive poetry tutor, Diane Maitland, and the two male poets Mickey adoredis smaller and sparer, though in its own way equally intense; and the versevariations on short, unrhymed couplets and singlets likely to remind American readers of Sylvia Plathwhether steamy or coolly appraising, is perfectly accessible. What's most interesting, of course, is what gets left out of the individual poemsalmost all the accidents of color and manner and high-fiber descriptionreducing each scene to a few snatches of lapidary dialogue and the susurrus of Jill's reflections. Of course the story is simpler than in Ross Macdonald, but Porter manages a deft balance between nervously lyrical moments and an insinuating forward movement. (First printing of 17,500; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 1995
ISBN: 1-55970-304-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
An emotionally wrenching story with a dramatic happily-ever-after.
A young woman with secrets finds home, community and a potential new love in a small North Carolina beach town; now if she can only rid herself of a past that haunts her, she may just have the life she’s always longed for.
No one in Southport, N.C., seems too concerned with the fact that Katie wants to keep to herself, even if it is a small town, and she’s a mysterious, pretty woman. But since there’s only one attractive, eligible man in the whole town—Alex, the widowed owner of the town’s general store—then it only makes sense that the two would notice each other. Throw in a couple of events that allow Katie to show herself as a woman of character (despite her secretive ways) and Alex to represent a perfect man, and of course, the two of them will wind up on the path to true love. Especially since she’s great with kids, and he just happens to have two of them, to whom he is a gentle, wonderful father with the patience of a saint. But, alas, Katie is a woman with secrets, and that generally means that there is someone out there looking for her. Since Katie lives in a tiny, isolated shack in the middle of nowhere, it’s a good thing she likes her quirky new neighbor, Jo. Jo encourages her to become more invested in Alex, who, everyone knows, is a good man. Romance progresses. A haunting past life catches up with Katie with frightening consequences. Love prevails.
An emotionally wrenching story with a dramatic happily-ever-after.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-455-52354-2
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2013
The various perspectives—with some characters knowing more than the reader does, while the reader knows more than...
’Tis the season for sequels—unexpected, decades removed from their well-remembered predecessors. June sees the return of Brett Easton Ellis with Imperial Bedrooms, another Elvis Costello–titled novel that revisits the lost boys of Less Than Zero, the lost men they have become a quarter-century later and the new Hollywood generation of lost girls after whom they lust. It also finds Oscar Hijuelos returning with Beautiful Maria of My Soul, the title of the lovesick ballad immortalized 20 years ago in his breakthrough novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Here, Hijuelos retells the story of that ill-fated romance from the perspective of its inspiration.
But first comes the May publication of Innocent, by Scott Turow, a sequel after 20 years to Presumed Innocent, the novel that not only launched the Chicago-based lawyer’s literary career but inspired a spate of popular courtroom procedurals. Though at least one other lawyer turned author has subsequently achieved greater commercial success, Turow remains the master of the form, at least partly because he’s more fascinated by the mysteries of the human heart than he is by the intricacies of the law. Here, suspense and discovery sustain the narrative momentum until the final pages, but character trumps plot in Innocent. The ironic title underscores the huge gap between innocence as a moral state of grace and “not guilty” as a courtroom verdict. Once again, Turow’s novel pits Rusty Sabich against Tommy Molto, former colleagues turned adversaries, with the former now chief judge of the appellate court and the latter as prosecuting attorney. Sabich remains more complicated and morally compromised, while Molto is much more certain of right and wrong. Exonerated in a murder trial 20 years ago, but his innocence never completely established, Sabich finds himself once again under suspicion after the sudden death of his mentally unstable, heavily medicated wife. As in the first novel, Sabich suffers the guilt of infidelity, but does this make him guilty of the murder Molto becomes convinced the judge has committed? Complicating the issue are the judge’s only son, more of a legal scholar than his father though with some of his mother’s emotional instability, and the whirlwind romance between the junior Sabich and the former clerk for the senior Sabich. To reveal more would undermine the reader’s own pleasure of discovery, but the judge, whether guilty or not, might prefer prison to the revelation of crucial secrets. “How do we ever know what’s in someone else’s heart or mind?” the novel asks. “If we are always a mystery to ourselves, then what is the chance of fully understanding anybody else?”
The various perspectives—with some characters knowing more than the reader does, while the reader knows more than others—contribute to an exquisite tension that drives the narrative. Where the title of the first novel may have presumed innocence, the sequel knows that we’re all guilty of something.Pub Date: May 4, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56242-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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