A decidedly jarring echo from the Roaring Twenties, neatly culled from press reports.
The bizarre Jazz Age tale of a dopey aristocrat and the lowly young woman he wed then tried to shed, invoking some highly charged issues of sex, class, race, and forgotten niceties.
Back in 1924, Leonard Kip Rhinelander, scion of a wealthy old New York family, married comely Alice Jones. After one month and six days, Kip left his bride and filed a noxious lawsuit seeking to have his marriage annulled. She fooled him, he said. Alice didn’t tell him that she was “colored.” The Rhinelander case was made for the press, mainstream as well as yellow. Reporters besieged Alice’s family, describing her white mother and “dusky” father (both immigrants from England), as well as her sisters and their consorts. Feckless Kip, it appeared, had known the family well before the nuptials, and after the wedding had lodged chez Jones with his bride. Disenchantment with Cinderella began when Papa Rhinelander found out about his new daughter-in-law and promptly dispatched his lawyers to redeem the blessed family name. It was a time when pseudo-science, at the service of social taboos, was preoccupied with racial assignment. The country, as well as the jury, wanted to know if a blueblood had been allied with a woman who had “black blood in her veins.” Did Alice dupe Kip by pretending to be pure white? Did she vamp him and make him her “love slave,” or was the lad simply lacking in stalwart manliness? During proceedings that resembled a carnival as much as a trial, minstrel man Al Jolson was called to testify that he never met Alice, the mother of the bride was grilled, and (because race was thought to be more evident around one’s torso) Alice was obliged to disrobe before the gentlemen of the jury. Yet demure Alice, back in her cloche, prevailed and Kip, in his spats, faded away.
A decidedly jarring echo from the Roaring Twenties, neatly culled from press reports.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-05019-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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