Another intriguing if overblown case for Scotland Yard's well-born Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and his down-to-earth Sergeant Barbara Havers (Playing for the Ashes, 1994, etc.), with some crucial input from Lynley's old friend, forensic scientist Simon St. James. Eleven years ago, Dennis Luxford, editor of the fast-rising anti-Tory newspaper The Source, had a short-lived affair with Eve Bowen—then a reporter, now a power-hungry MP slated for stardom in the Conservative Party. Luxford was never named the father of Charlotte, child of that affair, and Eve, long married, has refused all contact with him. Now, Charlotte has been kidnapped, and Dennis, married to Fiona and father of eight-year-old Leo, has been commanded to acknowledge his first-born on The Source's front page—or Charlotte will die. Eve, paranoid in her ambition, accuses Dennis of manufacturing a muckraking plot against her and refuses to call in the police or to agree to the kidnapper's demand. The acknowledgement of parenthood goes unpublished, and days later Charlotte's body is found in a canal in Wiltshire. Sergeant Havers is dispatched to the scene, there to work with local Detective Constable Robin Payne in a case made urgent by the kidnapper's renewed demands—and the life of a second victim at stake. With its unconvincing and off-the-wall plot, heavily detailed but repetitious investigations, and psychological misfits, political ploys, and power plays enough to furnish three novels, this latest from George seems bent on testing the patience and fortitude of her devoted fans—though, once again, thanks to her undeniable story-weaving skills, most will happily stay the course.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-553-09265-0
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Ambitious and very well written, despite the occasional overreach. When it’s made into a film, bet that Kim Jong Il will...
Note to self: Do not schedule a vacation in North Korea, at least not without an escape plan.
The protagonist of Johnson’s (Parasites Like Us, 2003, etc.) darkly satisfying if somewhat self-indulgent novel is Pak Jun Do, the conflicted son of a singer. He knows no more, for “That was all Jun Do’s father, the Orphan Master, would say about her.” The Orphan Master runs an orphanage, but David Copperfield this ain’t: Jun Do may have been the only non-orphan in the place, but that doesn’t keep his father, a man of influence, from mistreating him as merrily as if he weren’t one of his own flesh and blood. For this is the land of Kim Jong Il, the unhappy Potemkin Village land of North Korea, where even Josef Stalin would have looked around and thought the whole business excessive. Johnson’s tale hits the ground running, and fast: Jun Do is recruited into a unit that specializes in kidnapping Koreans, and even non-Koreans, living outside the magic kingdom: doctors, film directors, even the Dear Leader’s personal sushi chef. “There was a Japanese man. He took his dog for a walk. And then he was nowhere. For the people who knew him, he’d forever be nowhere.” So ponders Jun Do, who, specializing in crossing the waters to Japan, sneaking out of tunnels and otherwise working his ghostlike wonders, rises up quickly in the state apparatus, only to fall after a bungled diplomatic trip to the United States. Johnson sets off in the land of John le Carré, but by the time Jun Do lands in Texas we’re in a Pynchonesque territory of impossibilities, and by the time he’s in the pokey we’re in a subplot worthy of Akutagawa. Suffice it to say that Jun Do switches identities, at which point thriller becomes picaresque satire and rifles through a few other genres, shifting narrators, losing and regaining focus and point of view. The reader will have to grant the author room to accommodate the show-offishness, which seems to say, with the rest of the book, that in a world run by a Munchkin overlord like Kim, nothing can be too surreal. Indeed, once Fearless Leader speaks, he’s a model of weird clarity: “But let’s speak of our shared status as nuclear nations another time. Now let’s have some blues.”
Ambitious and very well written, despite the occasional overreach. When it’s made into a film, bet that Kim Jong Il will want to score an early bootleg.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9279-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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