An often engaging, if uneven, college-town mystery.
Parker’s (The Prospect, 2008) latest novel tells a tale of suspicious deaths, drugs and compromised investigations at a small West Virginia college.
Decent young man Cullen Brewer is a talented quarterback and student-body president at Clear River College. The fall semester looks promising for the Clear River Cougars until sophomore wide receiver Dane Antonelli is found dead in a dormitory stairwell. The coroner rules it a heart attack, which seems very odd to Serena Johnson, reporter for the college paper, and Serena and Cullen warily team up to get to the bottom of the mystery. They soon investigate Jordan Hancel, Cullen’s lifelong friend and teammate, who’s behaving suspiciously, and Jordan’s father, Tom, the chairman of the college’s Board of Governors, who wants to push a four-lane highway right through the campus. It also turns out that English professor John Petry’s athlete son died in similar circumstances years before. The story goes on to feature car crashes, fistfights and discoveries of drugs. Parker has delivered a readable mystery, but the novel contains some disconcerting missteps. At one point, for example, Darby’s Bar is located in Beaumont; at another, it has migrated to Buckhannon. In that same bar, Jordan and his father are served draft beers, but on the next page, the father’s beer is in a bottle. The prose also contains needless redundancies and wordiness (“The right front bumper of Matt’s car had clipped the edge of the guardrail, bending the front bumper”; “a headache that started pounding inside his head”). Often, the author’s choice of words could be simplified: Cullen “traversed” campus rather than simply crossing it, and professor Petry “ensnares” Cullen’s elbow rather than simply taking hold of it. That said, if readers can get past such distractions, there are rewards to be had. Parker handles the overall plot fairly well and is especially adept at depicting play-by-play football action and fight scenes.
An often engaging, if uneven, college-town mystery.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0983394785
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Mid-Atlantic Highlands Press
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
