A skillfully written novel with plenty of intrigue, plot twists, and romance.
The need for revenge runs deep in Ingold’s (Square, 2014, etc.) latest mystery/thriller.
Elisa Gilbert, a costume designer for a repertory company, abandons her life in Oregon and heads to her childhood home in San Francisco after she catches her actor husband and his leading lady in flagrante delicto. She moves in with her mother, Ruth Bolcar, a divorced alcoholic who’s proud of her daughter’s decision to leave. Lawrence “Pug” Bolcar, Elisa’s father, is a larger-than-life attorney who enjoys the ladies and a round of poker now and then, and he’s in financial trouble following a massive loss at cards. As Elisa attempts to sort her own life out, Pug tries to avoid paying his debt and becomes entangled in a series of events involving wiretaps, seemingly vengeful Colombians, and a drug-smuggling operation. Behind the scenes stands Harold Manx, a cop who’s never recovered from the loss of his daughter to a cult nearly 10 years ago. He blames Pug, who assisted her legally, for her estrangement and sets in motion a complicated scheme to embarrass and destroy him. Although Elisa has her hands full trying to take care of her mother and deal with a potential new love interest, she gets swept up in Pug’s troubles as well. Ingold’s book has all the makings of a film noir, with plenty of booze and cigarettes, but it has a neater (and happier) ending than most stories of that genre. Most of the characters show a layer of desperation; they’re all dealing with their own troubles while unknowingly caught in the same web. Ingold’s narrative is laid out like a movie or stage play, and its shifts from scene to scene are effortless. He maintains the easy flow of each character’s separate plotline until they all tie neatly together. Glimpses of everyday life, such as Harold and his wife doing dishes or Elisa standing alone on her balcony at night, provide welcome breaks from the complicated yet compelling sting operation involving Pug and Harold. The relationship between Elisa and her handsome new man is an enjoyable addition to the mystery.
A skillfully written novel with plenty of intrigue, plot twists, and romance.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9786-9519-4
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Wolfenden
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Top-flight fantasy collection based on Gaiman's character The Sandman, developed in a series of graphic novels for DC Comics, as reimagined by a strong group of fantasists. Long-lived comics readers will remember fondly the original "Sandman" from the 1930s and '40s, with his fedora, googly-eyed gas mask and gas gun; Frank McConnell discusses this precursor in his preface while hauling in Joyce, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Jung, and Wallace Stevens to dress up Gaiman's stow-parentage. Inventing his own lore for the character, Gaiman (1990's hilariously naughty Good Omens, with Terry Pratchett) wrote 75 installments of The Sandman before closing shop. Awash with watercolors and supersaturated with acid, The Sandman stories are stories about storytelling, celebrations of the outr‚ imagination. The central character of Gaiman's work evolved into a figure variously known as Dream, or Morpheus, or the Shaper, or the Lord of Dreams and Prince of Stories, and his surreal family is called the Endless, composed of seven siblings named Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium. Drawing on Gaiman's inkwell are Clive Barker (frontispiece but no story), Gene Wolfe and Nancy A. Collins, and a number of lesser lights, all in top form. George Alec Effinger invents a long tale inspired by Winsor McCay's classic comic strip "Little Nemo" ("Seven Nights in Slumberland"), while Colin Greenland ("Masquerade and High Water"), Mark Kreighbaum ("The Gate of Gold"), Susanna Clarke ("Stopt-Clock Yard"), and Karen Haber (in the outstanding "A Bone Dry Place," about a suicide crisis center) mainline directly from the ranks of the Endless. Rosettes to all, but especially to John M. Ford's "Chain Home, Low," which ties an onslaught of sleeping sickness to the fate of WW II fighter pilots, and to Will Shetterly's "Splatter," about a fan-convention of serial killers who lead their favorite novelist (famous for his depictions of psychopathic murderers) into the real world of serial-killing. Fancy unleashed on rags of moonlight.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-100833-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
Unabashedly over the top at times but, still, a saga that gives rise to as much amusement as it does sober reflection. A...
In a witty, wacky, and endlessly erudite debut, DeWitt assembles everything from letters of the Greek alphabet to Fourier analysis to tell the tale of a boy prodigy, stuffed with knowledge beyond his years but frustrated by his mother’s refusal to identify his father.
Sibylla and five-year-old Ludovic are quite a pair, riding round and round on the Circle Line in London’s Underground while he reads the Odyssey in the original and she copes with the inevitable remarks by fellow passengers. Sibylla, an expatriate American making a living as a typist, herself possesses formidable intelligence, but her eccentricities are just as noteworthy. Believing Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai to be a film without peer, she watches it day after day, year after year, while in the one-night stand with Ludo’s father-to-be, she wound up in bed with him for no better reason than it wouldn’t have been polite not to, although subsequently she has nothing but scorn for his utterly conventional (if successful) travel books. Ludo she keeps in the dark about his patrimony, feeding him instead new languages at the rate of one or two a year, and, when an effort to put him in school with others his age wreaks havoc on the class, she resumes responsibility for his education, which, not surprisingly, relies heavily on Kurosawa’s film. As Ludo grows up, however, he will not be denied knowledge of his father, and sniffs him out—only to be as disappointed with him as his mother is. Hopes of happiness with the genuine article having been dashed, Ludo moves on to ideal candidates, and approaches a succession of geniuses, each time with a claim of being the man’s son. While these efforts are enlightening, they are also futile—and in one case tragic—until Ludo finds his match in one who knows the dialogue of Seven Samurai almost as well as he does.
Unabashedly over the top at times but, still, a saga that gives rise to as much amusement as it does sober reflection. A promising start, indeed.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7868-6668-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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