Notable for its exploration of the uncanny bonds twins share and the killer’s memorably macabre motive.
Marr’s debut novel follows a San Diego medical student to, around, and ultimately beneath Paris in search of the twin sister she’d been drifting away from.
“Come to Paris. Your sister is dead,” neurology resident Sebastien Bronn cables Shayna Darby. No sooner does Shayna begin looking around her sister Angela’s apartment, however, than she finds a message in the secret code the twins had developed as children: “ALIVE. TRUST NO ONE.” Is the corpse the police fished from the Seine 10 days after a murderous attack on the Sorbonne left two of her fellow students dead really Angela Darby’s? Sebastien, Angela’s boyfriend, has identified it as hers, but Shayna, her suspicions on high alert, is convinced that it’s not. Weighed down with resentment that Angela never came home for the funeral of their parents when they were killed in a car accident, urged on by the eerie intimacy she continues to share with her twin, and armed with the scant clues she’s drawn from the documents Angela left behind, she embarks on a search she can only hope will bring them together once more. Can she trust Sebastien, whose solicitude suddenly erupts into something else when he kisses her passionately and murmurs, “Mon Angèle”? Or Jean-Luc Fillion, the foreign liaison at the American Embassy who places himself at her disposal? Or Louise Chang, the landlady whose mixed-race marriage echoes the twins’ own biracial roots? Or even Inspector Valentin, who disconcertingly suggests first that Angela may have been the victim of a serial killer and then that she may herself have murdered her fellow student and frenemy Emmanuelle Wood? As she tracks down clues amid the city’s historical brothels and the catacombs on which Angela had chosen to write her dissertation, Shayna feels increasingly close to her twin in ways that are both illuminating and profoundly disturbing.
Notable for its exploration of the uncanny bonds twins share and the killer’s memorably macabre motive.Pub Date: April 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-0605-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A murder is committed in a stalled transcontinental train in the Balkans, and every passenger has a watertight alibi. But Hercule Poirot finds a way.
**Note: This classic Agatha Christie mystery was originally published in England as Murder on the Orient Express, but in the United States as Murder in the Calais Coach. Kirkus reviewed the book in 1934 under the original US title, but we changed the title in our database to the now recognizable title Murder on the Orient Express. This is the only name now known for the book. The reason the US publisher, Dodd Mead, did not use the UK title in 1934 was to avoid confusion with the 1932 Graham Greene novel, Orient Express.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1934
ISBN: 978-0062073495
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1934
The parts with Nero Wolfe, the only character Goldsborough brings to life, are almost worth waiting for.
In Archie Goodwin's 15th adventure since the death of his creator, Rex Stout, his gossipy Aunt Edna Wainwright lures him from 34th Street to his carefully unnamed hometown in Ohio to investigate the death of a well-hated bank president.
Tom Blankenship, the local police chief, thinks there’s no case since Logan Mulgrew shot himself. But Archie’s mother, Marjorie Goodwin, and Aunt Edna know lots of people with reason to have killed him. Mulgrew drove rival banker Charles Purcell out of business, forcing Purcell to get work as an auto mechanic, and foreclosed on dairy farmer Harold Mapes’ spread. Lester Newman is convinced that Mulgrew murdered his ailing wife, Lester’s sister, so that he could romance her nurse, Carrie Yeager. And Donna Newman, Lester’s granddaughter, might have had an eye on her great-uncle’s substantial estate. Nor is Archie limited to mulling over his relatives’ gossip, for Trumpet reporter Verna Kay Padgett, whose apartment window was shot out the night her column raised questions about the alleged suicide, is perfectly willing to publish a floridly actionable summary of the leading suspects that delights her editor, shocks Archie, and infuriates everyone else. The one person missing is Archie’s boss, Nero Wolfe (Death of an Art Collector, 2019, etc.), and fans will breathe a sigh of relief when he appears at Marjorie’s door, debriefs Archie, notices a telltale clue, prepares dinner for everyone, sleeps on his discovery, and arranges a meeting of all parties in Marjorie’s living room in which he names the killer.
The parts with Nero Wolfe, the only character Goldsborough brings to life, are almost worth waiting for.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5988-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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