A teacher champions women’s liberation in the ’60s by stepping into the role of detective with guile and efficacy.
When a woman inherits a house, she must contend with both a ghost and a murder she’s determined to solve in this mystery.
Twentysomething Jesse Graham is ready to be independent. She’s moving to a small town in 1968 New York, where her inheritance from Aunt Helen awaits: an old, dilapidated home. It’s not ideal, but it’s a way to escape her indifferent mother and cheating ex-fiance, Robert Cronmiller. Jesse secures a teaching gig at St. Bartholomew’s, thanks to her nun friend Maggie, and sets about taking care of the house’s substantial mouse population. After befriending locals, including neighborly Joe Riley, Jesse’s shocked to learn that Helen’s death 20-plus years ago wasn’t an accident, but a suicide. She’s inclined to believe rumors of murder, however, once she suspects late-night noises in the house are Helen’s spirit asking for help. Jesse launches her own investigation, with assistance from cop Marty D’Amato, to prove someone killed her aunt. Her snooping and mingling with the townsfolk have made at least one individual skittish, as someone runs Jesse’s ’65 Beetle off the road and later leaves her a threatening note. She may be unfazed by the ghostly presence in her home, but an evil of the flesh-and-blood variety is something to fear, especially in light of a more recent murder. Meyette’s (Love’s Spirit, 2014, etc.) book starts as a ghost story but quickly becomes a mystery; any apprehension from the spooky dwelling, in fact, is immediately vanquished when Jesse declares herself unafraid. Nevertheless, a palpable menace generates suspense and a sense of urgency to track down Helen’s murderer(s). The protagonist’s desire to “depend solely on herself” isn’t entirely convincing, as she has a house, free and clear (with taxes paid by a trust), and a job Maggie practically hands to her. But her resolve as an amateur sleuth is admirable, and her reluctance to dive into a new relationship (considering how the last one ended) makes her wisely cautious. Jesse often subverts cynicism with humor: “It’s the living who haunt me,” she ominously asserts, before clarifying she means the house’s former rodent and arachnid residents.
A teacher champions women’s liberation in the ’60s by stepping into the role of detective with guile and efficacy.Pub Date: May 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4935-3096-0
Page Count: 318
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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