McBain himself doesn’t quite make the point, but the best of these performances do: The novella, once called the novelette,...
What’s a novella? McBain says, 10,000 to 40,000 words—and adds, “It ain’t easy.”
Still, a marquee list takes a shot at it here, including the editor himself. The range is wide, the success rate high, and the degree of pleasure on offer remarkable. John Farris’s engrossing “The Ransom Women,” in which a tough cop, a lovely girl and a famous painter collaborate in a lethal Faustian bargain, may be the best, though Sharyn McCrumb’s grim, heart-rending, beautifully modulated “The Resurrection Man” is close behind. McCrumb’s improbable hero, a gravedigger, finds redemption through suffering, courage and Ghandi-like adherence to principle. McBain in “Merely Hate” and Donald E. Westlake in “Walking Around Money” add worthwhile installments to long-running sagas: Steve Carella and his 87th Precinct buds have what may be a series of hate crimes on their hands, while Dortmunder, pricklier than usual, has thieves falling out on his. “The Corn Maiden” is Joyce Carol Oates’s disturbing portrait of a monstrous 12-year-old girl, a spooky distaff echo of Leopold and Loeb. Stephen King tells the chilling, though strangely moving, tale of a 9/11 survivor to whom survival becomes a burden. Lawrence Block’s deft, cheeky “Keller’s Adjustment” is 9/11-themed, too, after a fashion, in its focus on a lonely hit man’s career change in the wrenching aftermath. Anne Perry’s “Hostages” revisits the Troubles in Northern Ireland a bit melodramatically, and Jeffery Deaver’s take on cloning in “Forever” is a bit dull. But Walter Mosley’s “Archibald Lawless, Anarchist at Large” is the only real disappointment here: such great prose, so little story.
McBain himself doesn’t quite make the point, but the best of these performances do: The novella, once called the novelette, may be the ideal form for most crime fiction, if only there were a market for it.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-765-30851-7
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
A budding romance and an age-old motive combine in a heartwarming cozy.
A small-town businesswoman’s sleuthing marks her for death.
Winona Mae Montgomery saved her Granny Smythe’s apple orchard from ruin by building a thriving cider and event business in Blossom Valley, West Virginia. She’s receiving praise, and a hefty check, for throwing together a fabulous wedding reception for Elsie Sawyer and Jack Warren when the party's happy mood turns sour. The bride seems angry, the groom tipsy, and Winnie’s heartbreaking ex-boyfriend Hank Donovan’s interested in making out with a bridesmaid. But these minor glitches pale when the groom is found dead under the truck with "Just Married" on the window after having had words with Hank. Winnie developed a relationship with Sheriff Colton Wise in her last brush with murder (Apple Cider Slaying, 2019). Although he’s willing to listen to her ideas, he warns her off the case, a warning she ignores since Hank is a prime suspect. The best man, Aaron, had the key to the truck, but even after it turns up in the visor, Winnie keeps him on her list of suspects, along with the bride and the bridesmaid, who’s made herself scarce. After Hank’s sister, Gina, begs Winnie for help, they discover a bunch of flirty emails from Sarah Bear Twenty-two, who turns out to be the elusive bridesmaid. When Colton tells Winnie that mud found in her house contains mushrooms, she realizes that it may have been left by Hank, who has an old cabin in the woods, and she enlists her best friend, park ranger Dot, to help her find it. Soon after they find camping gear inside the cabin that Hank probably took from Winnie’s house, someone starts shooting at them, and they must run for their lives. Winnie realizes that she must find out a lot more about the bride and groom before she can possibly understand who murdered Jack and is willing to kill again to keep a secret.
A budding romance and an age-old motive combine in a heartwarming cozy.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2349-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are...
A perfect wife’s disappearance plunges her husband into a nightmare as it rips open ugly secrets about his marriage and, just maybe, his culpability in her death.
Even after they lost their jobs as magazine writers and he uprooted her from New York and spirited her off to his childhood home in North Carthage, Mo., where his ailing parents suddenly needed him at their side, Nick Dunne still acted as if everything were fine between him and his wife, Amy. His sister Margo, who’d gone partners with him on a local bar, never suspected that the marriage was fraying, and certainly never knew that Nick, who’d buried his mother and largely ducked his responsibilities to his father, stricken with Alzheimer’s, had taken one of his graduate students as a mistress. That’s because Nick and Amy were both so good at playing Mr. and Ms. Right for their audience. But that all changes the morning of their fifth anniversary when Amy vanishes with every indication of foul play. Partly because the evidence against him looks so bleak, partly because he’s so bad at communicating grief, partly because he doesn’t feel all that grief-stricken to begin with, the tide begins to turn against Nick. Neighbors who’d been eager to join the police in the search for Amy begin to gossip about him. Female talk-show hosts inveigh against him. The questions from Detective Rhonda Boney and Detective Jim Gilpin get sharper and sharper. Even Nick has to acknowledge that he hasn’t come close to being the husband he liked to think he was. But does that mean he deserves to get tagged as his wife’s killer? Interspersing the mystery of Amy’s disappearance with flashbacks from her diary, Flynn (Dark Places, 2009, etc.) shows the marriage lumbering toward collapse—and prepares the first of several foreseeable but highly effective twists.
One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are chilling.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-58836-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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